So they went out, Hugh’s arm about her, as strange a pair of lovers as ever tempted the spring--the great, scarred, uncouth, gray cripple and the slim, unseeing girl, groping and clinging, absolutely shut off from any contact with reality as long as this man should interpret creation for her. Sylvie turned back to wave at Pete, whom they had left standing in the doorway. “I’ll be hunting for you if you stay out late,” he called--to which Hugh shouted back: “You hunting for us! Don’t fancy I can’t take care of this child, myself.” “Both of them blind!” Pete muttered to himself in answer. They were moving rather slowly across the rough, sagebrush-covered flat, and presently Hugh led Sylvie into the fragrant silence of the forest trail. To her it was all scent and sound. Hugh whispered to her what this drumming meant and that chattering and that sudden rattle almost under their feet. They had to go slowly, Sylvie touching the trees here and there, along her side of the trail. He lifted her over logs and fallen trees, and sometimes, before he set her down, he kissed her. Then Sylvie would turn her head shyly, and he would laugh. Thus they made slow, sweet progress. “I see more in the woods with your eyes than I ever could with my own,” she told him. “I have eyes for us both,” he answered. “That’s why God gave me the eyes I have, because He knew the use I’d be making of them.” “Is this the trail Pete follows to the trading-station?” she asked. “I wish you could take me there, Hugh, or--would you let him take me?” He tightened his arm. “I can’t bear to have you out of my sight,” he answered. She sighed. “It seems so queer that they haven’t tried to find me. Do you suppose they think that I’m dead? Did Pete mail my letter to Miss Foby, I wonder?” “What does Miss Foby matter?” he asked jealously. “What does anything matter to you but--me? Here we leave Pete’s trail and I take you straight up the mountain, dear one. We’ll rest now and then; when we get to the rocky place just below the top, I’ll carry you. Are you happy? I always feel as if my heart melted with the snow when spring comes--a wild, free, tumbling feeling of softness and escape.” She sighed. “Yes--if only I could see. I miss my eyes out of doors more than in the house. Does snow-blindness really last so long? Perhaps it was the nervous shock and the exhaustion as much as the glare. I am sure it all will just go suddenly some day. I stare and stare sometimes, and I feel as if I might see--almost.” He frowned. “You mustn’t miss anything when you have me, Sylvie. Do you suppose I miss anything, now that I have you? My career, my old friends, my old life, my liberty, the world? That for everything!” He snapped his fingers. “If only I have you.” “You love me so much,” she answered, as though she were oppressed, “it frightens me sometimes.”