ve the
Great Design, the Perfect Plan, in all that we do?"

"Do you?" she asked.

He laughed.

"No. If I did I should sit down with folded hands, knowing myself
helpless in the inexorable grip of destiny. I should always be
perfectly passive."

"If you tried to do that you could not remain passive long. The
unreckonable element of chance would still operate to make you do this
or that. You couldn't escape it; nobody can."

"Then you don't believe there is a Destiny that shapes our ends,
rough-hew them how we will?" Lawanne said lightly.

Doris shook her head.

"Destiny is only a word. It means one thing to one person, something
else to another. It's too abstract to account for anything. Life's a
puzzle no one ever solves, because the factors are never constant.
When we try to account for this and that we find no fixed law, nothing
but what is subject to the element of chance--which can't be reckoned.
Most of us at different times hold our own fate, temporarily at least,
in our own hands without knowing it, and some insignificant happening
does this or that to us. If we had done something else it would all be
different."

"Your wife," Lawanne observed to Hollister, "is quite a philosopher."

Hollister nodded. He was thinking of this factor of chance. He himself
had been a victim of it. He had profited by it. And he wondered what
vagaries of chance were still to bestow happiness or inflict suffering
upon him in spite of his most earnest effort to achieve mastery over
circumstances. He felt latterly that he had a firm grip on the
immediate future. Yet who could tell?

Dusk began to close on the valley while the far, high crests of the
mountains still gleamed under a crimson sky. Deep shadows filled every
gorge and canyon, crept up and up until only the snowy crests
glimmered in the night, ghostly-silver against a sky speckled with
stars. The valley itself was shrouded under the dark blanket of the
night, through which the river murmured unseen and distant waterfalls
roared over rocky precipices. The two Indians attending Lawanne
squatted within the red glow of their fire on the bank. Downstream a
yellow spot broke out like a candle flame against black velvet.

"There is some one at Bland's now," Hollister said.

"That's their window light, eh?" Lawanne commented. "I may go down and
see him in the morning. I am not very keen on two or three weeks alone
in these tremendous silences. This valley at night now--