m wind came rustling through the
pine needles.

"I don't suppose," she was saying--he had never heard those notes in
her voice before: they were gold, gold flute notes to melt rock-hard
self-control and touch the timbre of unknown chords within--"I don't
suppose anything ever was accomplished without somebody being willing
to fight a losing battle. Do you?" Wayland stretched out on the
ground at her feet.

"Eleanor, do you know, do you realize--?"

"Yes I know," she whispered.

And somehow, unpremeditated and half way, their hands met.

"Something wonderful has happened to us both to-night."

The sheen of the stars had come to her eyes. She could not trust her
glance to meet his. A compulsion was sweeping over her in waves,
drawing her to him--her free hand lay on his hair; her averted face
flushed to the warmth of his nearness.

"I don't suppose, Dick, that right ever did triumph till somebody was
willing to be crucified. Men die of vices every day; women snuff out
like candles. What's so heroic about a man more or less going down in
a good game fight--?"

He felt the tremor in her voice and her hands, in her deep breathing;
and his manhood came to rescue their balance in words that sounded
foolish enough:

"So my old mountain talks to you, too? I'll think of that when I'm up
here in my hammock alone. Oh, you bet, I'll think of that hard! What
does the old mountain lady say to you, anyway? Look--when the light's
on that long precipice, you can sometimes see a snow slide come over
the edge in a puff of spray. They are worst at mid-day when the heat
sends 'em down; and they're bigger on the back of the mountain where
she shelves straight up and down--"

And her thought met his poise half way.

"What does the old mountain say? Don't you know what science says--how
the snow flakes fall to the same music of law as the snow slide, and
it's the snow flake makes the snow slide that sets the mountain free,
the gentle, quiet, beautiful snow flake that sculptures the granite--"

"The gentle, quiet--beautiful thing," slowly repeated the Ranger in a
dream. "That sounds pretty good to me."

He said no more; for he knew that the veil had lifted, and the
voiceless voices of the night were shouting riotously. The wind came
suffing through the swaying arms of the bearded waving hemlocks--Druid
priests officiating at some age-old sacrament. Then a night-hawk
swerved past with a hum of wings like the twang