or admiring comment,
because this was to them both a holiday and a ceremony.

Only a minute or two sufficed to carry him to the outskirts of the
little town, and he would have paid no further attention to the crowd,
but he thought he saw on its fringe a broad, powerful back that he knew.
When he undertook to take the second look and make sure the back was
gone, and Harley went on, telling himself, as one is apt to do, that it
was only his fancy. The echo of cheering came to his ears, and he knew
that the candidate, as usual, held the audience in his grasp. Presently
the echo died, and those that followed it did not come to him, as he had
left the town behind; although from the low crest of a swell he could
see the heads of the people surrounding Jimmy Grayson, and by the way
they bobbed back and forth he knew that the enthusiasm was boiling.

He went down the far side of the swell, passed a clump of bushes, and
came face to face with Sylvia Morgan. She, too, leaving the speech, had
been walking, and the color of her face was deepened by the exercise and
the crisp, bracing air. It had given her, also, an obvious exhilaration,
probably physical, that Harley had not seen before in a long time, and
her smile was of pure welcoming joy.

Harley's was an answering smile, but his heart was full of a longing and
an anger equally fierce. Never had she seemed to him more to be desired
than on that morning; tall, straight, and young, instinct with the life
and strength of the great upland reaches upon which she lived, her pure
soul looking out of her pure eyes, she was a woman to be won by the man
to whom her love was given, and he rebelled because he did not have the
right. Temptation was strong within him, and he had excuse.

"Speeches, however good, do not appeal to you to-day?" he said.

"No, I prefer the mountains."

She pointed to the line of peaks that formed a border of darker blue on
the horizon.

"So do I," said Harley, with emphasis, but he meant, at that moment,
that he was glad to be alone with her.

"Since chance has brought us together," he said, "why should we not
continue in this way?"

They walked on, and he was very close to her, so close that when a
wanton wind caught a stray ringlet of her hair it brushed lightly
against his cheek. Faint and fleeting as was the touch, every nerve
thrilled. He said fiercely to himself that she was his and should remain
his.

They came to a little brook, a stream of