Further and ever further into the heart of the solitudes they rode through the quiet hours of the forenoon, with Gloria ever more abstracted and Mark King holding apart from her, doing her reverence, drinking always deep of that soft, sweet beauty which was hers. They forsook the creeks where the yellow-leaved aspens fluttered their myriad little gleaming banners; they made slow, zigzag work of climbing a flinty-sided mountain; they looked back upon green meadow and gay poplar grove far below; they galloped their horses across a wide table-land over which shrilled the wind, already sharpened by the season for the work it had to do before many weeks passed.
Though there were some few level spaces, though now and then as King sought for her the easier way they rode down short slopes, with every mile put behind them they had climbed perceptibly. Already Gloria had the sensation of being by the world forgotten--though for her the world could not be forgot. A ridge from which they looked out across the peaks and valleys seemed to her like an island, lost, remote, eternally set apart from other people whom she knew, from all her life as she had lived it. She went on and on and felt like one in a dream, journeying into a fierce, rugged land over which lay a spell of enchantment, a spell that had been cast over it before King's all but immortal trees had burst from the seeds, so that now, while the outside world pulsed and beat with life, and swung back and forth with its pendulous progress, here all was unchanged, changeless.
King led her, well before midday, to the spot in which from the first he had planned that they would noon. A forest pool ringed with boulders, which were green with moss under the splashing of the water from above, where the swaying pines mirrored themselves and shivered in the little breeze which ruffled the clear, cold water. Here was a tiny upland meadow and much rich grass; here a sheltered spot where Gloria might sit in the sun and be protected from the colder air.
He was quick to help her to dismount and noted that she came down stiffly; the eyes which she turned to him were heavy with fatigue; some of the rose flush had faded from her cheeks.
"Maybe I shouldn't have let you come after all, dear," he said contritely. "These are harder trails than we've ridden before, and we've had to keep at it steadier."
There was an effort in her smile answering him.
"The last two days have been hard to get through with," she said as she yielded to his insistence and sat down on the sun-warmed pine-needles. "I am sorry I am so--so----"