"If it were true! Oh, I might--I might lift my head!" she cried.
"Lift it then--you child. For I swear it's true."
She did lift her head with the singular wild grace always a part of her actions, with that old unconscious intimation of innocence which always tortured Venters, but now with something more--a spirit rising from the depths that linked itself to his brave words.
"I've been thinking--too," she cried, with quivering smile and swelling breast. "I've discovered myself--too. I'm young--I'm alive--I'm so full--oh! I'm a woman!"
"Bess, I believe I can claim credit of that last discovery--before you," Venters said, and laughed.
"Oh, there's more--there's something I must tell you."
"Tell it, then."
"When will you go to Cottonwoods?"
"As soon as the storms are past, or the worst of them."
"I'll tell you before you go. I can't now. I don't know how I shall then. But it must be told. I'd never let you leave me without knowing. For in spite of what you say there's a chance you mightn't come back."
Day after day the west wind blew across the valley. Day after day the clouds clustered gray and purple and black. The cliffs sang and the caves rang with Oldring's knell, and the lightning flashed, the thunder rolled, the echoes crashed and crashed, and the rains flooded the valley. Wild flowers sprang up everywhere, swaying with the lengthening grass on the terraces, smiling wanly from shady nooks, peeping wondrously from year-dry crevices of the walls. The valley bloomed into a paradise. Every single moment, from the breaking of the gold bar through the bridge at dawn on to the reddening of rays over the western wall, was one of colorful change. The valley swam in thick, transparent haze, golden at dawn, warm and white at noon, purple in the twilight.
At the end of every storm a rainbow curved down into the leaf-bright forest to shine and fade and leave lingeringly some faint essence of its rosy iris in the air.
Venters walked with Bess, once more in a dream, and watched the lights change on the walls, and faced the wind from out of the west.
Always it brought softly to him strange, sweet tidings of far-off things. It blew from a place that was old and whispered of youth.
It blew down the grooves of time. It brought a story of the passing hours. It breathed low of fighting men and praying women.
It sang clearly the song of love. That ever was the burden of its tidings--youth in the shady woods, waders through the wet meadows, boy and girl at the hedgerow stile, bathers in the booming surf, sweet, idle hours on grassy, windy hills, long strolls down moonlit lanes--everywhere in far-off lands, fingers locked and bursting hearts and longing lips--from all the world tidings of unquenchable love.