pened his eyes to his duty as a man, that he accepted it, yet found
a strange obstacle in the perplexing, tumultuous, sweet fear of ever
going near her again.

Suddenly, then, all his thought revolved around the girl, and, thrown
off his balance, he weltered in a wilderness of unfamiliar strange
ideas.

When he awoke next day the fight was on in earnest. In his sleep his
mind had been active. The idea that greeted him, beautiful as the
sunrise, flashed in memory of Auchincloss's significant words, "Take
your chance with the girl!"

The old rancher was in his dotage. He hinted of things beyond the range
of possibility. That idea of a chance for Dale remained before his
consciousness only an instant. Stars were unattainable; life could
not be fathomed; the secret of nature did not abide alone on the
earth--these theories were not any more impossible of proving than that
Helen Rayner might be for him.

Nevertheless, her strange coming into his life had played havoc, the
extent of which he had only begun to realize.

For a month he tramped through the forest. It was October, a still
golden, fulfilling season of the year; and everywhere in the vast dark
green a glorious blaze of oak and aspen made beautiful contrast. He
carried his rifle, but he never used it. He would climb miles and go
this way and that with no object in view. Yet his eye and ear had
never been keener. Hours he would spend on a promontory, watching
the distance, where the golden patches of aspen shone bright out
of dark-green mountain slopes. He loved to fling himself down in an
aspen-grove at the edge of a senaca, and there lie in that radiance like
a veil of gold and purple and red, with the white tree-trunks striping
the shade. Always, whether there were breeze or not, the aspen-leaves
quivered, ceaselessly, wonderfully, like his pulses, beyond his control.
Often he reclined against a mossy rock beside a mountain stream to
listen, to watch, to feel all that was there, while his mind held a
haunting, dark-eyed vision of a girl. On the lonely heights, like an
eagle, he sat gazing down into Paradise Park, that was more and more
beautiful, but would never again be the same, never fill him with
content, never be all and all to him.

Late in October the first snow fell. It melted at once on the south side
of the park, but the north slopes and the rims and domes above stayed
white.

Dale had worked quick and hard at curing and storing his winter sup