The moments of bliss that silence a woman rouse a man to make sure of his rapture. “How do you like it, Marsh?” he asked, trying at one of these times to peer round into her face. “Are you afraid?” “No,--only of getting back too soon.” He made the shivering echoes answer with his delight in this, and chirruped to the colt, who pushed forward at a wilder speed, flinging his hoofs out before him with the straight thrust of the horn trotter, and seeming to overtake them as they flew. “I should like this ride to last forever!” “Forever!” she repeated. “That would do for a beginning.” “Marsh! What a girl you are! I never supposed you would be so free to let a fellow know how much you cared for him.” “Neither did I,” she answered dreamily. “But now--now the only trouble is that I don't know _how_ to let him know.” She gave his arm to which she clung a little convulsive clutch, and pressed her head harder upon his shoulder. “Well, that's pretty much my complaint, too,” said Bartley, “though I couldn't have expressed it so well.” “Oh, _you_ express!” she murmured, with the pride in him which implied that there were no thoughts worth expressing to which he could not give a monumental utterance. Her adoration flattered his self-love to the same passionate intensity, and to something like the generous complexion of her worship. “Marcia,” he answered, “I am going to try to be all you expect of me. And I hope I shall never do anything unworthy of your ideal.” She could only press his arm again in speechless joy, but she said to herself that she should always remember these words. The wind had been rising ever since they started but they had not noticed it till now, when the woods began to thin away on either side, and he stopped before striking out over one of the naked stretches of the plain,--a white waste swept by the blasts that sucked down through a gorge of the mountain, and flattened the snow-drifts as the tornado flattens the waves. Across this expanse ran the road, its stiff lines obliterated here and there, in the slight depressions, and showing dark along the rest of the track. It was a good half-mile to the next body of woods, and midway there was one of those sidings where a sleigh approaching from the other quarter must turn out and yield the right of way. Bartley stopped his colt, and scanned the road. “Anybody coming?” asked Marcia. “No, I don't see any one. But if there's any one in the woods yonder, they'd better wait till I get across. No horse in Equity can beat this colt to the turn-out.” “Oh, well, look carefully, Bartley. If we met any one beyond the turn-out, I don't know what I should do,” pleaded the girl.