you must remember you
are looking upon two sensible young people, who have resolved to keep
each other strong to their resolutions. He had planned exactly how he
would conduct himself when this meeting came; guarded, very guarded, so
guarded she must know he was keeping a grip for both. And she had
known exactly what she would do when he came: she would be frank,
perfectly frank and open; for had they not both taken the resolution?
And when she came to herself, it was as that night at the Death
Watch--her face thrown back and he was kissing the pulsing veins of her
throat, saying in a voice between a breath and a whisper--"When one has
ached in the Desert for seven weeks, one is pretty thirsty."

"Let me go, dear! This wild happiness is a kind of madness."

"Give me all you have for me in but one more!" He bent over her face;
when he released her, she was faint.

He offered her hand-hold down over the tree trunks to the lake; and
when their feet touched solid earth again, took a grip of the situation
to relieve her embarrassment and began talking furiously of the Desert
ride and the dream face that had twice saved his life. Eleanor stopped
stock still.

"Why, _that_ was my dream," she explained; and their hands met half way
and before she had finished telling, it had happened all over again.

They were standing on the margin of the lake. The sun was behind the
peak, and the wine glow lay on the snow cross, and the topaz gate was
ajar again to the new infinite life, and I think they were both a
little bit afraid. An old world poet has said something about fools
rushing in where angels fear to tread. The mountaineer expresses the
same thought in his own more picturesque and I think more poetic
vernacular, certainly it is a vernacular _next_ to life rather than
books. It is an axiom that "only the most blatant tenderfoot, the most
tumble-footed greenhorn, will monkey on the edge of a precipice."

The marbled water shadows deepened to fire in the Alpine after glow;
and the little waves of the lake came lipping and lisping and laving at
their feet.

"There is no use trying to tell about it or talk it out," burst out
Wayland.

"Don't," said Eleanor. "Mr. Matthews told us much last night: and I'll
dig the rest out of him the next time I see him."

"I'm not talking of the Desert. I'm talking of you. It's so
God-blessed beautiful, Eleanor! I used to think and think in the
Desert what this would be like