r lives was, after all, no more wonderful than the changes
which they saw had taken place in nature about them. A luxuriant growth
of tropical vegetation, succeeded by vast forests of conifers, a remnant
of which still survived upon the mountains, once flourished in the
semi-desert through which they traveled. An occasional broken,
half-buried pillar, or the remains of a crumbling wall that had
witnessed the passing of the ages and listened to the tales borne on the
winds, marked the existence of vanished civilizations of which men
to-day know naught. All things appeared to change and fade, nothing
seemed permanent, not even the ideal; the morrow was but a forgetting.

Beneath them they felt the Earth, ponderous and weighty and crushing in
its immensity to the imagination, and whose existence seemed of little
moment in comparison to the countless worlds that filled the universe
about them. Yet, insignificant though it appeared, was it not a link in
the great universal scheme of matter, and did it not stand in the same
relation to the universe as their individual lives to the human race?

Like two stars their souls had rushed together from the uttermost
confines of space. She had been led into his world, and he compelled to
retrace his steps to almost primitive conditions in order that they
might find one another and together take up the thread of their common
destiny. Clearly, they were children of destiny upon whose brows God had
set His seal. They realized that the path which lay before them was not
one entirely strewn with flowers. That between the chosen ones, life
meant something more than the love of a man for a woman, or a woman's
for a man. That they still stood with their feet in the flame; that
earth's cup of joy for them must still remain one of bitter-sweet; that
they must go on to the end in order that men might see and hear; that
the new order of things must spring from them.

Gay was the Princess. She laughed and talked and related incidents of
her life and her people; the silvery tinkle of the bells on her spurs,
accompanying every movement of her horse, chimed sweetly with her mood.
In the raven folds of her blue-black hair, she wore again the red
berries as on the day when first he beheld her. She seemed a part of
that tawny landscape, splashed with great patches of crimson and gold
and gray and purple--the spirit and incarnation of the Indian summer.

As he gazed upon her and listened to her words,