e camp-fire light they
saw no faces except their own; and when they were silent it was all
stillness, unless the wind passed among the pines, or some flowing water
was near them. Sometimes at evening they came upon elk, or black-tailed
deer, feeding out in the high parks of the mountains; and once from the
edge of some concealing timber he showed her a bear, sitting with an
old log lifted in its paws. She forbade him to kill the bear, or any
creature that they did not require. He took her upward by trail and
canyon, through the unfooted woods and along dwindling streams to their
headwaters, lakes lying near the summit of the range, full of trout,
with meadows of long grass and a thousand flowers, and above these the
pinnacles of rock and snow.

They made their camps in many places, delaying several days here, and
one night there, exploring the high solitudes together, and sinking deep
in their romance. Sometimes when he was at work with their horses, or
intent on casting his brown hackle for a fish, she would watch him with
eyes that were fuller of love than of understanding. Perhaps she never
came wholly to understand him; but in her complete love for him she
found enough. He loved her with his whole man's power. She had listened
to him tell her in words of transport, "I could enjoy dying"; yet she
loved him more than that. He had come to her from a smoking pistol, able
to bid her farewell--and she could not let him go. At the last white-hot
edge of ordeal, it was she who renounced, and he who had his way.
Nevertheless she found much more than enough, in spite of the sigh that
now and again breathed through her happiness when she would watch him
with eyes fuller of love than of understanding.

They could not speak of that grim wedding eve for a long while after;
but the mountains brought them together upon all else in the world and
their own lives. At the end they loved each other doubly more than at
the beginning, because of these added confidences which they exchanged
and shared. It was a new bliss to her to know a man's talk and thoughts,
to be given so much of him; and to him it was a bliss still greater to
melt from that reserve his lonely life had bred in him. He never would
have guessed so much had been stored away in him, unexpressed till now.
They did not want to go to Vermont and leave these mountains, but the
day came when they had to turn their backs upon their dream. So
they came out into the plains once