to let Firio and his little cavalcade pass. All
the while she continued to look at him through the screen of her
half-closed lashes in a way that set her repose and charm apart as
something precious and cold and baffling. Now he realized that he had
made a breach in the barrier of their old relations only to find himself
in a garden whose flowers fell to ashes at his touch. He saw the light
that enveloped her as an armor far less vulnerable than any wall, and the
splendor of her was growing in his eyes.

Jag Ear's bells with their warm and merry notes became a faint tinkle
that was lost in the depths of the defile. The two were alone on the spot
where the Eternal Painter had introduced them so simply as Jack and
Mary, and where he, as the easy traveller, had listened to her plead for
his own life. It was his turn to plead. She was not to be won by fighting
Leddys or tearing up pine-trees by their roots. That armor was without a
joint; a lance would bend like so much tin against its plates, and yet
there must be some alchemy that would make it melt as a mist before the
sun. It was tenanted by a being all sentiency, which saw him through her
visor as a passer-by in a gallery. But one in armor does not fly from
passers-by as she had flown while he was climbing up the canyon wall with
his pine-tree branch.

"I have learned now to look over any kind of a precipice without getting
dizzy," she announced, quietly.

He was not the Jack who had come over the ledge in the energy of his
passion yesterday to find her gone. He had turned gentle and was smiling
with craved permission for a respite from her evident severity as he
dropped to a half-lying posture near her. Overhead, the Eternal Painter
was throwing in the smoky purple of a false thunderhead, sweeping it away
with the promise of a downpour, rolling in piles of silver clouds and
drawing them out into filmy fingers melting into a luminous blue.

"One can never tire of this," he said, tentatively.

"To me it is all!" she answered, in an absorption with the scene that
made him as inconsequential as the rocks around her.

"And you never long for cities, with their swift currents and busy
eddies?" he asked.

"Cities are life, the life of humanity, and I am human. I--" The
unfinished sentence sank into the silence of things inexpressible or
which it was purposeless to express.

Her voice suggested the tinkle of Jag Ear's bells floating away into
space. If a precipitate