It seemed to him, now, that his love was born that evening when he had first heard her violin, as he was fishing; when he had watched her from the cedar thicket, as she made her music of the mountains and as she danced in the grassy yard.

Why, he asked himself, had he not been conscious of his love in those days when she came to him in the spring glade, and in the days that followed?
Why had he not known, when he painted her portrait in the rose garden?
Why had the awakening not come until that night when he saw her in the company of revelers at the big house on Fairlands Heights--the night that Mr.Taine died?
It was dark before he reached the canyon gates.

In the blackness of the gorge, with only the light of a narrow strip of stars overhead, he was forced to ride more slowly.

But his confidence that he would find her at the Ranger Station had increased as he approached the scenes of her girlhood home.

To go to her friends, seemed so inevitably the thing that she would do.