" she went on, leaning
closer, and speaking low and fervently. "Isn't it enough that I love
you with all there is of me . . . Eldred; that I ask you to believe me,
and to make me . . . your very wife. There: you have compelled me to
say everything! Are you satisfied now?"

To such a question he could find no answer in words. But his silence
was cardinal. He put an arm round her, straining her close, and with a
sigh of sheer rapture she lifted her face to his.

Their eyes met. Then their lips; and Eldred Lenox entered into a
knowledge that he dreamed not of. The whole soul of his wife came to
him in that kiss; and for a long minute ecstacy held them.

Then he released her, slowly . . . reluctantly.

"Shall we sit out here?" he said. "The whole camp will soon be asleep;
but I can't let you go yet."

She sank down, forthwith, upon the grassy slope, in which the fire of a
June sun still lingered; and clasping her hands about her knees, looked
up at him invitingly. By way of response he stretched himself full
length, a little below her, resting on his elbow in such a position as
afforded him a clear view of her profile, that gleamed, like a cameo
against a background of deodars.

"Smoke," she said softly.

"No. I think not."

His tone had a touch of constraint, and a lone silence fell.

The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the enchantment of
being alone in it together; and there was that in their hearts that
made speech difficult.

They sat looking northward toward the moonlit hollow where the station
camp clustered close to the forest's edge. Behind the camp--a mass of
unbroken shadow--it climbed up and upward to the mystery of a sky,
powdered with the gold-dust of faint stars, on which its jagged outline
was printed black as ink. Beyond that again, one majestic
snow-peak,--like a stainless soul rising out of a tomb,--gleamed in the
light of an increasingly brilliant moon. The crowd round the bonfire
had crumbled into a hundred insignificant seeming units; and the fire
itself, no longer aspiring to the stars, glowed like an angry eye in
the dusky face of the glade.

Presently Quita spoke.

"There is so endlessly much to say, that I don't know where to begin.
And after all, I am utterly content just to feel that you are there;
that I have really got you back at last."

"You have had me, body and soul, these five years," he answered simply.
"It is I who have gained you, by some mi