of Mediterranean blue.

There was a wonder in the moment which the yearning in his spirit was
tempted to take as symbolic, and perhaps prophetic, of his future. Where
all day long he had seen nothing but hard ridges packed against one
another, without water, without snow, without perspective, without a
shred of mist, without a hint of mystery, without anything to set the
mind to wondering what was above them or beyond them, the dissolving
views of late afternoon began to throw up a succession of lovely ranges,
pierced by valleys, glens, and gorges. Where the eye had ached with the
harsh red of the rocks spread with the harsh green of the scant
vegetation, soft vapors rose insensibly--purple, pink, and
orange--changing into nameless hues as they climbed into the great
clefts and veiled the rolling domes and swathed the pinnacles and
furrowed the deep passes and put the horizon infinitely far away. The
transmutation from conditions in which Nature herself seemed for once to
be barbaric, alien, hostile to civilized man, painted with Cheyenne
war-paint and girdled with a belt of scalps, to this breaking up of
glory into glory, of color into color, and of form into form, rising,
mingling, melting, fading, rising and mingling again, melting again,
fading again, passing swiftly in a last brief recrudescence from gold
into green and from green into black, with the hurried eclipse and the
sudden tranquillity of night--the transmutation which produced all this
was to Thor hopeful and in its way inspiriting. In the last rays of
light he drew out his fountain-pen and the scribbling-book he kept for
notes by the way, writing quickly without preamble or formality.

"Thanks for telling me about Rosie. It is as it should be--as will be
best. Jim saved her. Nothing so good could ever happen to her as to
marry him.

"As for me, there are two things, Lois, that I can truthfully affirm. I
can declare them the more emphatically because I have had time to think
them over--to think you over, and myself. If I ever had a doubt about
them I haven't now, because leisure and solitude have enabled me to see
them clearly. The first is that I have given you my best; and the
second, that I have given it without any restriction of which I have
been aware. If there was anything I withheld from you, and which you
think you should have had, I can only say that it was not of the nature
of my best. What it was I make no attempt to say, nor would it do any