Another span of hours the little horse strode on at his quick step, valiantly lifting her up steep ascents, or descending the sides of ravines with devoted sureness of foot, treading narrow ways where she could feel that he hugged the bush-lined bank, and knew that a fall lay the other side. "The hardest thing--the hardest thing!" Again she muttered it, beating at her purpose. And again, that mental, passionless query lifted its head. Strike it down as she would, its cool, curious eyes were always on her, not denying, not disputing, only questioning, calmly but implacably, until her soul seemed to writhe in loyalty to her motives, holding them sacred even from questioning. "The hardest thing"--but her brain rang with the relentless question--"are you doing it because it is the hardest thing or because you want to do it?" "I am doing it because I want to do the hardest thing." "A quibble!" She set her lips, shut her eyes, even to the darkness, and tried to deafen her ears to the sounding thing. A long time she rode so. And then she wept because she was alone and cold and dying and unsuccored by the only one who could have comforted her. "I would never, never have left _you_!" she called back toward Ewing, with the first reproach she had ever given him. Her voice had a broken sweetness like that of a child speaking through tears. "I'd never have let you be so cold! I'd have stayed--stayed by you--warmed you--comforted you!" But after a little her tears ceased, as an unpitied child wears out its crying, and her eyes closed again as she laughed at her own sad lack of reason. When she opened her eyes again she gave a little gasping cry of relief. The black of the night had faded to gray. A dull, dark, opaque gray it was, but ghosts of the land already bulked massively through it; shrouded, vague shapes without line. And the spirit of her purpose quickened as she looked. Slowly the mist lightened, still opaque but silver now, and presently she saw the murky face of a nearby rock and could trace the cedar that twisted outward from its summit. They were amazing shapes to her, so long had she seemed to live in the dark, and she named them over, wonderingly--"A tree, a rock--a rock, a tree!" Again the question struck at her: "You want to do the hardest thing?" "I _must_ do the hardest thing--it only happens that I also wish to." "Is there nothing harder than what you are doing?" Again she shut her eyes and set her lips, but the voice came with merciless insistence. "_What_ would be harder than dying?" Then she threw back her head and challenged the voice. "_Living!_ To live would be harder." She made the confession without flinching, even with a laugh, and a weight dropped from her. "Then you are not doing the hardest thing--not doing it--not doing the hardest thing!"