She lay for hours on some bleached log high in a sunny glade, her hands under her fair head, her lips smiling unconsciously, her long blue eyes dreaming into the cloud-flecked heavens, and sometimes she wondered what the future held for her after the fashion of maids since the world began. She recalled the restless wanderings of the family in her early years, remembered vaguely the home and the school in old Missouri, her father’s ceaseless urge for travel. And then had come their journey’s end, here in the austere loneliness of Nameless Valley, where his nomad heart had settled down and had been at home. She thought of these familiar things, and of others not familiar, such as picturing the house she and Bud would one day build on the big meadow, with running water piped from the rushing stream itself, with carpets—Mrs. Allison was already sewing interminable balls of “rags” for the fabric—and with such simple comforts as seemed to her nothing short of luxuries. She knew of a woman in Bement who wove carpets, a Mrs. Porter, at the reasonable price of thirty cents a yard, warp included. The warp should be brown-and-white, she decided—at least she had so decided long back after many conferences with her mother. Brown and white running softly through the dim colors of the rags—nothing new enough to be bright went into the balls, though there would be a soft golden glow all through the hit-and-miss fabric from the “hanks” dyed with copperas—brown and white, Nance thought, would make it seem like the floor of the woods in fall, weathered and beautiful. She could scarcely wait the time of the fulfillment of this dress, when the cabin floors should be soft under foot. Longing for the refinements was strong in her, though limited painfully to such simple scope as Cordova supplied, or as she remembered dimly from the days of her childhood in Missouri. But the glory of the land was too compelling for idle dreams of the future. Here at hand were carpets of brown pine needles, shot through with scarlet bleeding hearts. Here were mosses soft and wonderful when one bent close enough to study their minute and intricate patterns. Here were vast distances and dropping slopes, veiled in pale blue haze so delicate as to seem an hallucination. Here also, were the mysterious fastnesses of Blue Stone Cañon, its perpendicular walls of eroded rock cut by seam and fissure, its hollow aisles resonant always of the murmurous stream that tumbled through them.