ave so far outdone me that you have filled my soul with
discontent!"

"Alas," said the man, "you have served me the very same trick! I could
almost wish--"

"That I had not come!"

"Say, rather, that you would come again!"

She stood up and reached for her sweater, waiting for him to open the
door. The round of the little valley was a glittering green bowl filled
with pink cloud scuds. They stepped out into a jubilant world washed
clean and freshly smiling. She put out her hand in good-bye.

"I almost think I shall come again! If you were a person with whom one
could be solitary--who knows!"

When she appeared the next time she found him by the noise of his
chopping. They climbed to the top of the moss-covered boulder that hangs
poised over the ledge where the stream leaps into the abyss. Below them
the hills rolled in an infinite recession of leaf-clad peaks to the sky
line, where they melted to a blur of bluish-green mist.

"Oh, these mountains of America!" she cried, "their greenness is a thing
of dreams to us who know only bare icy and alps!"

"Far lovelier," he said, "to look down upon than to look up to, I think.
To be a part of the height comes pretty near to being happy, for the
moment."

She turned from the view to study her companion. The lines in the
corners of his kind, tired eyes, the lean, strong figure, hair graying
about the temples. He grew a little impatient under it before she spoke.

"Do you know," she said slowly, "I am going to like you! To like you
immensely--and to trust you!"

"Thank you, I shall try to be worthy"--even his derision was gentle--"I
seem to remember having been trusted before by members of your sex--even
liked a little, though not perhaps 'immensely'! At any rate this
certainly promises to be an experience quite by itself!"

"Quite by itself," she echoed.

"Wouldn't it be as well for you to know my name, say, as a beginning?"

"No," she nodded, "that's just what I don't want! I only want to know
you. Names are extraneous things--tags, labels--let us waive them. If I
tell you how I feel about this meeting of ours will you try to
understand me?"

The answer was less in words than in the assent of his honest gray eyes.

"I have been surfeited all my life," she went on, "with love--I want no
more of it! The one thing I do want, more than anything else, is a man
friend. I have thought a great deal about such a friendship--the give
and take on equal terms, the sexles