So Glenn Kilbourne loomed heroically in Carley's transfigured sight. He
was one of Carley's battle-scarred warriors. Out of his travail he had
climbed on stepping-stones of his dead self. Resurgam! That had been
his unquenchable cry. Who had heard it? Only the solitude of his lonely
canyon, only the waiting, dreaming, watching walls, only the silent
midnight shadows, only the white, blinking, passionless stars, only the
wild creatures of his haunts, only the moaning wind in the pines--only
these had been with him in his agony. How near were these things to God?
Carley's heart seemed full to bursting. Not another single moment could
her mounting love abide in a heart that held a double purpose. How
bitter the assurance that she had not come West to help him! It was
self, self, all self that had actuated her. Unworthy indeed was she of
the love of this man. Only a lifetime of devotion to him could acquit
her in the eyes of her better self. Sweetly and madly raced the thrill
and tumult of her blood. There must be only one outcome to her romance.
Yet the next instant there came a dull throbbing--an oppression
which was pain--an impondering vague thought of catastrophe. Only the
fearfulness of love perhaps!
She saw him complete his task and wipe his brown moist face and stride
toward her, coming nearer, tall and erect with something added to his
soldierly bearing, with a light in his eyes she could no longer bear.
The moment for which she had waited more than two months had come at
last.
"Glenn--when will you go back East?" she asked, tensely and low.
The instant the words were spent upon her lips she realized that he
had always been waiting and prepared for this question that had been so
terrible for her to ask.
"Carley," he replied gently, though his voice rang, "I am never going
back East."
An inward quivering hindered her articulation.
"Never?" she whispered.
"Never to live, or stay any while," he went on. "I might go some time
for a little visit.... But never to live."
"Oh--Glenn!" she gasped, and her hands fluttered out to him. The shock
was driving home. No amaze, no incredulity succeeded her reception of
the fact. It was a slow stab. Carley felt the cold blanch of her skin.
"Then--this is it--the something I felt strange between us?"
"Yes, I knew--and you never asked me," he replied.
"That was it? All the time you knew," she whispered, huskily. "You knew.
... I'd never--marry you--never live out here?"