e saying. And then with my own two eyes I saw
the miracle: Saw her--the girl who had just had all the concentrated
passion of the Her of the world--turn and follow you into the house. It
was a blow to me! Oh 'twas an awful blow."

"Why a blow?"

"In the first place that you should want to, and then that you should
be able to. My philosophy gives you of the sunny paths no such desire
nor power."

"Showing," she deduced quickly and firmly, "that your philosophy is
all wrong."

"Oh no; showing that the much toasted Miss Katherine Jones is too big for
mere sunny paths. Showing that she has a latent ambition to climb a
mountain in a storm."

Fleetingly she wondered how he should know her for the much toasted Miss
Katherine Jones, but in the center of her consciousness rose that
alluring picture of climbing a mountain in a storm.

"Tell me how you did it."

"Why--I don't know. I had no method. I told her I needed her."

"_You_--needed _her_?"

"And afterwards, in a different way, I told her that again. And I
did. I do."

"Why do you need her? How do you need her?" he urged gently.

She hesitated. Her mouth--her splendid mouth shaped by stern or tender
thinking to lines of exquisite fineness or firmness--trembled slightly,
and the eyes which turned seriously upon him were wistful. "Perhaps,"
said Katie, "that even on sunny paths one guesses that there are such
things as storms in the mountains."

It was only his eyes which answered, but the fullness of the response
ushered them into a silence in which they rested together
understandingly.

"I sat there watching the house," he went back to it after the moment. "I
was sure the girl would come out again. 'She'll bungle it,' I said to
myself. 'She'll never be able to put it through.' But time passed--and
she did not come out!"--inconsistently enough that came with a ring of
triumph. "And then the next day--after the wonder had grown and grown--I
saw her driving with you. I was just off the head of the Island. She was
turned toward me, looking up the river. Again I saw her eyes, and in them
that time I read _you_. And I don't believe," he concluded with a little
laugh, "that my stock of hate can ever be quite so secure again."

They talked on, not conscious that it was growing late. Time and place,
and the conventions of time and place, seemed outside. She let him in
quite freely: to that edge of fun and excitement as well as to the
strange and somber places. It