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Over the divide to the north they went, down to the spruce-trees which Smoke had glimpsed the preceding afternoon. They followed the stream for a dozen miles, abandoning it when it trended to the west and heading directly eastward up a narrow tributary. The first night was spent in a camp which had been occupied for several days.
In his life in the hills he had found a little brightness, while in the old mountaineer's words that evening, he had glimpsed a future happiness, of which he had scarcely dared to dream. With the single exception of that one wild night, his life had been an unbroken calm. Now he was to leave it all. And for what?
He led her to the wooden couch, which had perforce to serve as seat as there was none other in the tent, and took her cloak, passing his hand gently across the sable collar which encircled her throat; and he glimpsed the hurt of her heart down in the depths of her eyes when she looked up at him and put out her hand and stopped him when, murmuring something about coffee, he turned to the entrance.
Instead, he glimpsed it farther on, and gave chase, taking what precautions he could against betraying himself. Through the grove and the gate and across the road he followed, in doubt half the time whether it was worth the trouble. Still, if it was what he suspected, a lesson taught now would probably insure against future disturbances of the sort, he thought, and kept stubbornly on.
Twice, while still on the city streets, he had passed belated pedestrians and once he had glimpsed a policeman under a street lamp. He had not paused, however, for his one desire was to get home and to discover if his father had been injured.
It was partly hysterical, partly the sudden realization that he was not the only one who had, that morning, found much in his companion which was insistently boyish. For until then she had not glimpsed this side of that grown-up spirit which, in the boy, had evinced more than once a confidence in self so serenely unshakable that it had bordered on doggedness at times.
The bath-room adjoining, which was also to belong to the daughter of the house, was white, shiny tile from floor to ceiling, and it contained every conceivable device known to the mind of a modern plumber that makes for comfort in a bath-room. Could Elinor have but glimpsed the high-backed tin tub in which Arethusa had bathed all of her life at the Farm!
And one lovely September morning the British Military Observer with the Italian army, and his very British aid, sat on a sunny rock on the Col de la Reine and watched a Canadian northward reconnaissance nothing much to see, except a solitary moving figure here and there on the mountains, crawling like a deerstalker across ledges and stretches of bracken a few dots on the higher slopes, visible for a moment, then again invisible, then glimpsed against some lower snow patch, and gone again beyond the range of powerful glasses.
They never flagged through pictures and sculpture galleries, immense crowded churches, ruins and museums, Judas trees and prickly pears, wine carts and palaces, they admired their way unflinchingly. They never saw a stone pine or a eucalyptus but they named and admired it; they never glimpsed Soracte but they exclaimed. Their common ways were made wonderful by imaginative play.
But there were patches of inpenetrable blackness under the wider flung trees, and it seemed likely, from what Zoraida had said, that some of her rabble were watching him. If so, he deemed it as well to know for certain. So he kept straight on toward the whitewashed wall glimpsed through the foliage. He came to it and stopped; it was little higher than his head and would be no obstacle in itself.
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