h, "The sun is almost
down."

"Must you go so soon?"

"I will come again if you wish."

"But you must not go yet; wait till the sun reaches the mountain-tops
yonder. I want you to tell me more about your own land."

So he lingered and talked while the sun sank lower and lower in the
west. It seemed to him that it had never gone down so fast before.

"I must go now," he said, rising as the sun's red disk sank behind the
mountains.

"It is not late; see, the sun is shining yet on the brow of the snow
mountains."

Both looked at the peaks that towered grandly in the light of the
sunken sun while all the world below lay in shadow. Together they
watched the mighty miracle of the afterglow on Mount Tacoma, the soft
rose-flush that transfigured the mountain till it grew transparent,
delicate, wonderful.

"That is what my life is now,--since you have brought the light to the
'watcher for the morning;'" and she looked up at him with a bright,
trustful smile.

"Alas?" thought Cecil, "it is not the light of morning but of
sunset."

Slowly the radiance faded, the rose tint passed; the mountain grew
white and cold under their gaze, like the face of death. Wallulah
shuddered as if it were a prophecy.

"You will come back to-morrow?" she said, looking at him with her
large, appealing eyes.

"I will come," he said.

"It will seem long till your return, yet I have lived so many years
waiting for that which has come at last that I have learned to be
patient."

"Ask God to help you in your hours of loneliness and they will not
seem so long and dark," said Cecil, whose soul was one tumultuous
self-reproach that he had let the time go by without telling her more
of God.

"Ah!" she said in a strange, wistful way, "I have prayed to him so
much, but he could not fill _all_ my heart. I wanted so to touch a
hand and look on a face like my mother's. But God has sent you, and so
I know he must be good."

They parted, and he went back to the camp.

"Is my mission a failure?" he thought, as he walked along, clinching
his hands in furious anger with himself. "Why do I let a girl's beauty
move me thus, and she the promised wife of another? How dare I think
of aught beside the work God has sent me here to do? Oh, the shame and
guilt of such weakness! I will be faithful. I will never look upon her
face again!"

He emerged from the wood into the camp; its multitudinous sounds were
all around him, and never had the coarseness a