* * * * * "I love this!" said Gloria softly.
She was drinking a tin cup of strong cheap coffee cooled with condensed milk; in her other hand was a thick man-made sandwich of bread, butter, and corned beef. King laughed.
"What?" he demanded. "What particular article of my daintily served luncheon has made the great hit with you? Is it, perhaps, the rancid butter that you adore?"
"You know. I love this." Her look embraced the universe--began with the dying fire, swept on beyond the tree-tops against the deep blue of sky. "I don't know why people live in cities, with all of this shut out."
"The call of the wild!" He spoke lightly and yet he glimpsed a soul really stirred; saw that for the moment, if for no longer, the great solitudes held her enthralled. More seriously he added: "It's the blood of your ancestors. It is just getting a chance to make itself heard. The racket of Market Street drowns it out."
She nodded thoughtfully. They did full justice to their lunch, finished with her purchases for dessert, quite as he had prophesied, and lazed through the nooning hour. Gloria lay on a yielding mat of pine-needles, her eyes grave as her spirit within her was grave, moved by influences at once vague, restless, and tremendous. This was not her first day in the woods, and yet she felt strangely that it was. He had spoken of her "ancestors." She knew little of her mother's and her father's forbears; she had never been greatly concerned with individuals whom she had never known. In a way she had been led to think, by her own mother, however so innocently, that she was "living them down." They had been of a ruder race that had lived in a ruder day. In San Francisco, to Miss Gloria Gaynor in a pretty new gown, one of a cluster of dainty girls, those grandparents had seemed further away than the one step of removal between them and her nearer blood. To-day they came near her, very near, indeed, for the hour that she lay looking up at the sky. Not many words passed between her and King; he sat, back to tree, and smoked his pipe and was quite content with the silence.
She started out of a reverie to find King standing up, his body rigid as he stood in the attitude of one who listens, his head a little to one side, his eyes narrowed.
"Wait for me," he said. "I'll be back in just a minute."