They drifted like a lurching vessel through the long crystal day. Never before this journey into Hidden Creek had time meant anything to Sheila but a series of incidents, occupations, or emotions; now first she understood the Greek impersonation of the dancing hours. She had watched the varying faces the day turns to those who fold their hands and still their minds to watch its progress. She had seen the gradual heightening of brilliance from dawn to noon, and then the fading-out from that high, white-hot glare, through gold and rose and salmon and purple, to the ashy lavenders of twilight and so into gray and the metallic, glittering coldness of the mountain night. It was the purple hour when she said good-bye to Saint Mark on the far side of a swift and perilous ford. She was left standing in the shadow of a near-by mountain-side while he rode away into the still golden expanse of valley beyond the leafy course of the stream. Hidden Creek had narrowed and deepened. It ran past Sheila now with a loud clapping and knocking at its cobbled bed and with an over-current of noisy murmurs. The hurrying water was purple, with flecks of lavender and gold. The trees on its banks were topped with emerald fire where they caught the light of the sun. The trail to Miss Blake's ranch ran along the river on the edge of a forest of pines. At this hour they looked like a wall into which some magic permitted the wanderer to walk interminably. Sheila was glad that she did not have to make use of this wizard invitation. She "cached" her bundle, as Saint Mark had advised, in a thicket near the stream and walked resolutely forward along the trail. Not even when her pony had left her on The Hill had she felt so desolate or so afraid. She could not understand why she was here on her way to the ranch of this strange woman. She felt astonished by her loneliness, by her rashness, by the dreadful lack in her life of all the usual protections. Was youth meant so to venture itself? This was what young men had done since the beginning of time. She thought of Hilliard. His life must have been just such a series of disconnected experiments. Danger was in the very pattern of such freedom. But she was a girl, _only_ a girl as the familiar phrase expresses it--a seventeen-year-old girl. She was reminded of a pathetic and familiar line, "A woman naturally born to fears ..." A wholesome reaction to pride followed and, suddenly, an amusing memory of Miss Blake, of her corduroy trousers stuffed into boots, of her broad, strong body, her square face with its firm lips and masterful red-brown eyes; a very heartening memory for such a moment. Here was a woman that had adventured without fear and had quite evidently met with no disaster.