"Or if it had never happened before—if we were actually looking at the very first… . Ah!" she broke off on a deep breath; for a faint vibration, less of light than of air, a ripple of coming life, had begun to flow over the sky and the opposite mountains, hushing every incipient sound. There was a lull after that first tremor; a lull lasting so long that it seemed as if, after all, nothing in the landscape had moved or altered. Then Miss Spear, laying her hand on Vance's shoulder, turned him about toward a break in the swarthy fell of the eastern mountains; and through it came the red edge of the sun. They watched in silence as it hung there apparently unmoving; then they glanced away for a moment, and when they looked back they saw that it had moved; saw the forerunning glow burn away the ashen blur in the forest hollows, the upper sky whiten, and daylight take possession of the air. Again they turned westward, looking toward the Hudson, and now the tawny suffusion was drawing down the slopes of the farther shore, till gradually, very gradually, the river hollows also were washed of their mists, and the great expanse of the river shone bright as steel in the clear shadow.

Vance drew a deep breath. His lips were parted, but no word came. He met Miss Spear's smiling eyes with a vague stare. "Kubla Khan?" she said. He nodded.

"You'd never seen one of our sunrises?"

"No, only over the prairies."

"Well, that must be rather splendid too. But very different—like seeing it over the sea."

He made no response, for he had never seen the sea, and there was no room in his soul for more new visions.

"It's less of an effort to see the sun rise in Illinois, I suppose?" Miss Spear continued. "You only have to look out of your window. Here it involves mountaineering, and it's given me a mountaineer's appetite; hasn't it you?"

He didn't know; he supposed so; but he hardly heard what she said. His whole sentient self was still away from him, in the blue and gold of the uprolling. He would have liked to lie down there on the edge of Thundertop between the misty splendours below and the pure light above, and let the hours drift by while the chariot of the day described its great circuit before him. At such moments he was almost disembodied.

"Come along, Vance! I'm ravening. Ham and eggs over a gipsy fire!" She slipped a comrade-arm through his, and they started to scramble down from their eminence, leaving at each step a fragment of the mighty spectacle behind them. Vance, reluctantly following, thought to himself: "She never stays anywhere more than five minutes—"