there not dramatic triumph in summoning him to behold
her exalted?

For behind all this reasoning, of course, and below all his real passion
for her, lay the poisonous, proud, Whig sense of superiority, the
conviction that, desirable though she was, his choice exalted her.
Would not ten thousand women--would not a hundred thousand--have counted
it heaven to stand in her place?

Yet she had earnestly begged off the rite which to every one of these
women would have meant everything. This puzzled him.

On second thoughts the puzzle had dissolved. She accepted his
negations, and, woman-like, improved on them. The marriage service was
humbug; therefore she had willed to have none of it. The attitude was
touching. It might have been convenient, had he been less in love.

But he was deeply in love, so deeply that in good earnest he longed to
lift and set her above all women. For this, nonsensical though they
were, due rites must be observed.

At the last pinch she had broken away. Was it possible, then, that
after all she did not love him? She had crossed her arms once and
called herself his slave. . . .

Not for one moment did he understand that other scepticism which, forced
out of faith, clasps and clings to reverence; which, though it count the
rite inefficient, yet sees the meaning, and counts the moment so holy
that to contaminate the rite is to poison all.

Not as yet did he understand one whit of this. But he vehemently
desired her, and his desire was straight. Because it was straight,
while he rode some inkling of the truth pierced him.

For, as he rode, he recalled how she had cast up an arm and turned to
flee. His eyes had rested confusedly on the breast-knot of scarlet
leaves, and it seemed to him, as he rode, that he had seen her heart
beating there through her ribs.

Chapter VI.

"YET HE WILL COME--".

The cabin stood close above the fall. It was built of oak logs split in
two, with the barked and rounded sides turned outward. Pete Vanders
would have found pine logs more tractable and handier to come by, and
they would have outlasted his time; but, being a Dutchman, he had built
solidly by instinct.

Also, he had chosen his ledge cunningly or else with amazing luck.
A stairway shaped in the solid rock--eight treads and no more--led down
to the very brink of the first cascade; yet through all these years,
with their freshets and floods, the cabin had clung to its perch.
Within