"little name," as the French call it, spoken by the woman he loves. It
is as the sound of a bell in the distance, a familiar note with a new
meaning, revealing new things of life in the panorama of the mind. By
those two words Orlando knew what was in the mind of Louise. They were a
prayer for protection and a cry for comradeship.

When Louise first clasped hands with the Young Doctor on her arrival at
Askatoon, the soft appeal of her fingers had made him understand that
loneliness where she lived, and to bear which she sought help. But the
"Oh, Orlando!" which was wrung from her, almost unknowingly, was the cry
of one who, to loneliness, had added fear and tragedy. Yet behind the
fear, tragedy and loneliness there was the revelation of a heart.

A courtship is a long or a short ceremonial or convention, a make-
believe, by which people pretend that they slowly come to know and love
each other; but lovers know that each understands the other by one note
or inflection of the voice, by one little act of tenderness. These, or
one of these, tell the whole story, the everlasting truth by which men
and women learn how good at its worst life is, or speak the lightning-lie
by which the bones of a dead world are exposed to the disillusioned soul.

This had been a great day, because, in it, physical being had joyously
celebrated itself in a wild business of the hills; in air so fresh and
sweet that it almost sparkled to the eye; in a sun that was hot, but did
not punish; at a sport by which the earliest men in the earliest age of
the world made life a rare sensation. The man who has not chased the
wild pony in the hills with the lasso on his arm, riding, as they say in
the West, "Hell for leather," down the steep hillside, over the rock and
the rough land, balancing on his broncho with the dexterity of a bird or
a baboon, has failed to find one of life's supreme pleasures.