You would look and look at the winged flames of light swimming and
shimmering and melting outlines in the opal clouds there, till almost
it became a sort of Mount of Transfiguration, of free uncabined
roofless night-dreams camped beneath the sheen of a million stars.

You would listen and listen to the mountain silence--rare, hushed,
silver silence--till almost you could hear; but until to-night it had
always been like the fall of the snow flake. You could never be quite
sure you heard, though there was no mistaking a mass of several million
years of snow flakes when they thundered down in avalanche or broke a
ledge with the boom of artillery.


Now, at last--was it the end of a million years of pre-existence
waiting for this thing? Now, at last, Wayland realized that the quiet
fellowship, the common interests, the satisfaction of her presence, the
aptitude their minds had of always rushing to meet halfway on the same
subject, had somehow massed to a something within himself that set his
blood coursing with jubilant swiftness.

He looked at the rancher's daughter. What had happened? She was the
same, yet not the same. Her eyes were awaiting his. They did not
flinch. They were wells of light; a strange new light; depth of light.
Had the veil lifted at last? The welter of sullen anger subsided
within him. The wrapped mystery of the mountain twilight hushed
speech. What folly it all was--that far off clamor of greed in the
Outer World, that wolfish war of self-interest down in the Valley, that
clack of the wordsters darkening wisdom without knowledge! As if one
man, as if one generation of men, could stay the workings of the laws
of eternal righteousness by refusing to heed, any more than one man's