"

Somehow they did not look at each other for a time after that, and walked
a bit apart.

They drew together again little by little as they wandered over the
clearing, in a close examination of their domain, which Charles-Norton,
with his passion for big flights and sweeping outlooks, had up to now
neglected. They found a miniature cascade that purled over a mossy log; a
cave, so small and clean and regular that it seemed not the work of the
big Nature about them, but of delicate, elfin hands; and then, on the
edge of forest and grass, a flower, a trembling white chalice upon the
virginal bosom of which one small touch of color burned like a flame. And
thus, little step after little step, they went from little wonder to
little wonder. Dolly liked small things; it was the microscopic aspect of
Nature that touched her heart; she had an adjective all her own for such:
they were "baby" things--baby flowers, baby brooks, baby stars. This
appealed less to Charles-Norton, hungry for big sweeps. And even now, he
caught himself yawning once, and casting a look at the crest far away.

In the afternoon, in the full warmth of the clear sun, he inveigled her
into the lake for a swim. They splashed in the silver waters like merman
and mermaid; and when, after a glistening disappearance within the cabin,
Dolly emerged again, she was tucked in a fuzzy bathrobe that made her
look like a little bear.

They sat long afterward on a warm slope in the sun. Crickets hopped about
them; Charles-Norton at intervals heard by his side Dolly's musical
giggle as one of them struck her. A bird on a long twig balanced above
them, and for a time a squirrel chattered at them in mock scolding from
the top of a pine. Little by little Charles-Norton sank into a profundity
of well-being. He could see ahead, now, his life stretching placid and
colored, solved at last, with both Dolly and the wings, uniting love and
freedom, the ecstasies of flight with the tenderness of home----

"Goosie," said Dolly; "let's go in."

The sun was gone. It had sunk into the plain, far off. "Wait," he
whispered, looking toward the crest, inflamed with living light. The
peaks gleamed, the domes glowed, the glaciers flashed, the whole sky-line
crackled with a great band of color. Then swiftly from the plain a shadow
ran up the mountain sides, extinguished, one after the other, peak, and
dome, and glacier; it went up toward the clouds with its long swift lope:
the clouds be