t had spread for
her, watching his face change its mood with each flying cloud.

"Our luck is wonderful to-day, Nan," he said at last. "The guides say
this is one of the rarest days a traveller ever finds on this peak. We
might come a hundred times and never strike it again."

"Why?" she asked lazily.

"The air's so crisp and clear. A mountain fifty miles away seems a
stone's throw. We've but to sweep the horizon with a single turn of the
head and see six states of the Union. Eastward stretches North
Carolina, to the coast, to the north there in that bristling line of
lower hills stands old Virginia. To the west loom the mountains of
Tennessee and Kentucky and southward rise the crags of western Georgia
and South Carolina--but it don't seem so wonderful to you, I suppose."

"Why not?"

"You must see most of it from your windows every day."

"But not with your eyes, Jim!" she cried. "I have everything and I have
nothing. There is no meaning to anything we do or see or possess if the
one thing we desire is withheld."

"I might have made that speech, Nan," he said thoughtfully. "It sounds
strange on your lips."

"With my houses in town and country, with every whim of body and soul
apparently gratified, perhaps it does sound strange. But suppose that
all this madness of luxury, at which you wonder, is but the vain effort
of a hungry heart?"

The man was silent. The question was too dangerous to try to answer,
too dangerous to leave unanswered.

"You haven't answered," she insisted.

"No. Answers to such questions don't come so glibly here in these
silent places, Nan," he responded seriously.

"That's why I brought you here," she confessed. "Besides, I knew you
loved this wild spot. The memory of your rapture that day, sixteen
years ago, has never left me."

"You used to love such places, too," he said looking away over the blue
billows. "What deep-toned eternal things they spoke! How small and
contemptible the struggle of the insects in those valleys below!"

"Come back to my question," the woman insisted, with quiet
determination. "You are not a coward. The time has come in our lives
when we should begin to see things as they are."

"I've been trying to do that for a long time," he answered sorrowfully.

"And haven't succeeded," she added promptly. "The trouble is, Jim, that
life is a tissue of lies. We are born in lies, grow up in lies, live
and move and have our being in lies. Our highest wisdom is th