"Don't forget the picnic," she said. "We start for the pine woods at eight, if the weather holds. Is that too early for you?" "I think I can manage it," he said, smiling. They were together all day. Margaret was a mountaineer, and the Alps drew Hayden like a magnet. They talked of the Jungfrau, the Eiger, the Blumlisalp, the Finsteraarhorn, and how they must have just missed each other a dozen times at Cortina, Chamonix, Grindelwald, and Macugnana. An infatuated old colonel tried to detach her. "It's no good talking to my sister, sir," young Fettes said irreverently. "When once she gets on to Alpine shop you won't bring her to earth unless you have a new peak up your sleeve." Margaret heard and laughed. "That's Irish," she said. 'Anyhow, Alpine shop is better than golf.' After breakfast they must needs climb rocks. There was the Toad Rock, which squatted on the edge of the cliff, and seemed about to leap over. They found a crevice in its back and conquered it. There was Scott's Nose, named after the prominent feature of a general who had commanded the division. They climbed it and rolled fir-cones down on the groundlings underneath. They were abandoned as hopeless children to follow home. Mrs Chicester had no misgivings. The summit of the ridge challenged them four miles to the east, but they had loitered, and the sun was low. "Can you give me to-morrow?" Hayden asked. Margaret could. They had not spoken an intimate word all day, but each had found a new way to tread on pine needles and breathe mountain air. Gerard knew that Alps and Himalayas would be barren and flat for him without her from that hour. Margaret felt that her love for the woods and hills had become a passion; she felt a new kinship with earth, a joy which thrilled through her like the cicada's song. Yet it was penetrated with a vague distress till she read his eyes as 8 woman can, and the deeps of her own unveiled. It As they walked their horses home, the band of white cloud that had rimmed the mountains to the north all day melted from a single peak, revealing a dazzling rift of snow. caught the rays of the setting sun, and faded through violet and lavender to ashen grey. A dozen forest-capped ridges intervened, each with a different light or shade upon it, from a faint lingering gold to a deep purple, merging into blackness under the shadow of a cloud. The peak appealed to them with the extraordinary fascination which great mountains have for restless folk constrained on a narrow ridge. Margaret expressed the longing of them both to invade the solitude of its ice - fields and camp among its glaciers. "You shall," Gerard spoke abstractedly, as if registering a vow to himself. did not answer. Margaret spontaneous, The words had escaped him. They were part of his daydreams. But he was no mere visionary; the castles he built in the air generally materialised. "Forgive me," he said. "I spoke like an oracle. It was an instinct. I am sure you will." It was not the moment to explain. Margaret rode on silently. The words, so sudden and perplexed her. Had they been deliberate she would have resented them. They recurred to her again and again through the night, and she interpreted them different ways, half angry with herself because she hesitated to admit their only possible meaning. In spite of herself, when her eyes closed she saw the peak and a white tent beside it, like twin sugar-cones. Hayden was haunted by the same vision. The third day of their era broke gloriously. They left Gerkal early, and at nine o'clock stood by the cairn on the summit of the ridge. Overhead the sky was cloudless. The air was never so clear. To the north the distant snowpeaks challenged them-calm, remote, unchangeable. To the south and east the plains stretched away to a far horizon, broken by the Sewaliks purple, green, and cobalt-and veined with a tissue of shimmering silver where the watercourses had burst their channels. A mile to the east, on a spur of the ridge, there was a hamlet with grey stone houses clustered among terraced ricefields. They could hear women's voices and the tinkling of cowbells. Beyond the village was a shrine standing on the edge of the cliff just where the hill bevelled off to the plain. was the end of the mountain, and offered a new goal to their roving spirits. It II. The place was all their own save for a solitary vulture which hopped round them curiously, attracted to the spot for some unsavoury reason known to itself. Hayden picked up a stone from the cairn to throw at it. "Look at this!" he said. "I believe it's an image.” They examined the heap of stones. It was something more than a cairn, rather a rude plinth, or primitive altar, with a horizontal slab of stone on it, against which was propped a row of little men, or goblins, or gods. The one which Gerard had taken up might have been a freak, a miniature of the ghoulish faces on the rock; but the thing was repeated in little chips of gneiss with bulging contours dimly suggesting head and waist. Margaret was exploring the other side of the cairn. "Look at this dear bogie!" she said. "Did you ever see anything so quaint?" And she held up a gross stone god, the kind of idol that Hinds have appeased since the days before Rimmon. There were five of them in a niche under a ledge of slate, no two alike, but all the authentic genii of the place. Margaret's bogie was placid and obese, its companions elfish, malignant, satirical, the work of some uncouth herdsman or anchorite who lived alone in a hut, the neighbour of the invisible, listening to the voices in the pine-trees, and watching the gnomes peep through the grey mist. They told an artless legend of haunted woods, brooding presences in the rain, the struggle between the tutelary and the malignant. Looking at them one could understand the sculptor's apprehensions, his timid groping intimacy with the un seen. Gerard had never seen a woman tread so surely over the fallen trunks and loose broken boulders. Beasts that fled at clumsy footsteps waited her approach. They surprised a doe gooral half asleep in a hollow, which turned and stared at her before plunging down the glade. And she could be still: when she leant against a pine-trunk the butterflies would settle on her glove. They threaded the woods silently, and when they spoke it was not of themselves. Gerard had looked forward to hearing her talk of the early associations of her life, her home, her girlhood, her school, her travels. These were golden fields to explore. Yet he was content; he learnt how intimate impersonal talk can be, what a subtle web of sympathy it weaves with its unspoken confidences, and the suggestion of being side by side and sharing things through common inheritance. Margaret had called the image her dear bogie. It was congenial to the place, as Pan to Arcady, or Syrinx to the reed-fringed pool. Gerard thought it a happy phrase. It was dear because Margaret had found it, and because it had been waiting there perhaps since years before either was born, to greet them both in the hour and place that would merge them into one. Margaret was fascinated. But she and Gerard were in love with every stick and stone of dear earth. They trod on consecrated ground. When Margaret stooped to detach a delicate pink begonia blossom all huddled among the ferns in a crevice of the rock, Gerard watched her fingers playing lightly over the dewy-patterned leaves, and became the helpless captive of a brown curl that fell over the nape of her neck. She stood on the knife-edge of a crag and watched an eagle He propped the image up swoop across the ridge, its against the breakfast basket. shadow pursuing over the "His Obesity will preside," he grassy hummocks underneath. said, and busied himself with She was at home on the the fire while Margaret unmountains and in the woods. packed. VOL. CLXXXVI,-NO. MCXXVIII. 21 III. towards the surface by some undercurrent or swaying back into obscure depths. Margaret smiled. "You look at me as if I were the Sphinx," she said. When she spoke or laughed, Gerard thought from thought the most beautiful thing about her was her voice. He would have crawled over flints for miles on his bare knees to hear her speak. The silences vibrated with her last words. Before they left the knoll Margaret was his own. The woods had joined them. This mystery of sweet womanhood was his to unfold before he knew what rare influences had fashioned her. They passed almost imperceptibly from plans for the hour to plans for all time. Folk would have called it the oddest wooing. They were just Captain Hayden and Miss Fettes, then Gerard and Margaret. The stars had been working to bring them together to serve the eternal fitness of things. This allsufficient fact they knew, and no more. The sun shone; the sky was a flawless arc of blue; the plains glimmered below. But But the beauty and peace and unwonted sunshine could not make them any happier than they were. They accepted it all as part of their gift. The brightness of the outer world only reflected their own; it might have been conjured up by them. The magic was in themselves. If Nature unpuckered her brow and breathed balm for their sakes, she was constrained; she could not do anything else. They lay for hours on the warm grassy knoll almost too happy for connected speech. For long minutes they would say nothing. Gerard gazed at her quiet profile as one looks into a deep clear pool, trying to discover the outlines of things hidden and mysterious, stirred with a hazy suggestion They had nothing eloquent to say-just the few things that have always been said, but their talk sounded to each like a kind of joyous pagan Benedicite. "I can smell the pines." May." knew from what stock or soil the other sprang. Margaret wondered if Gerard's father was the hero of Bodistan; she knew all the frontier annals. He was; Margaret was glad. Gerard learnt that Margaret lived at Fettes-her family had given the place its name. There was romance in that. She seemed to breathe the fragrance of the heather, and the gorse, and the pines. She carried herself like a girl who had leant against the wind on the moors. He plied her with question. Had she another name? Did she know Portsmouth, where his old father lived? Was she fond of hunting? She had another name. It was Teresita a Spanish aunt had given it her. She did not know Portsmouth. She loved hunting. The least inflection of her sweet voice left him with the sense of having listened to a verdict. As she spoke he became aware of an unwonted respect for Spain, a detached pity for Portsmouth, an increased devotion to the chase. The future absorbed them. One thing was certain-they must spend Gerard's furlough together. He had to be back for the cavalry-camp at Nowshera in the third week of November, so he must apply for leave thought of home, but there was no time. Portsmouth and Fettes must wait till next year. They spoke of many places, but all the while neither of them had forgotten the peak. It had certainly precipitated things. Margaret thought of Gerard's abstracted "you shall," and at once. They the unbidden vision it had called up for her as her eyes closed. In Gerard's mind the peak was suffused from the first with a kind of hymeneal glow. He looked towards the North. It had emerged again, rising from its bed of cloud like Aphrodite from the foam— remote, mysterious, of sovereign purity, appealing to him with its irresistible challenge. "Look," he said, pointing to it. "It is calling us." "But," said Margaret. "It would mean that we must marry at once." "But where? When- -?" "There is a church and a milliner in Simla. The road to the snows lies straight on. It is on the way." Margaret gave a despairing little sigh. "I suppose we had better be quick," she said, "if we are going to do it in your leave.' What Gerard said or did is not for profane ears. It was proper to the occasion. "I should love it, but I would not dream of taking it." Margaret was pleading for His Obesity. She had said she IV. coveted him, so Gerard was for taking him home. The idol was was wise and friendly. It looked as if it had known |