Reymund sat beside her, his knees drawn up, his hands clasped round them. It was very cool; the air was so still that he wondered at the absence of a stinging frost, and he hugged himself thus for warmth. Orient stirred in her half-recumbent sleep, and her head fell on his shoulder. After that the solid mountain was less immovable than he. He let the beautiful head remain, watching it with downcast, sidelong gaze; if he had longed with all his heart to smooth one tress, to put his arm over her in a sheltering embrace, he dared not touch her. Something said to him that she was of a grade above, as the disembodied is beyond the clay; said, too, that whatever lovely or fine there might be in himself, the thickness of the outer wrapping rendered it invisible to her; that for Orient to read him right he must wait for another life. In spite of all that, he hoped,--hoped madly and wildly, there in the chill night, with the beautiful head fallen on his shoulder and the sweet, warm breath stealing gently across his bending brow. He had a strange fancy now and then that out of the encircling shadow a great face came and looked,--whether that of some uncreated thing, some phantasm of his brain, or that of some celestial being, some resident of vast spaces, or only a wild beast, a big, brown bear, roving on their tracks and coming to peer about their unprotected bivouac. Whatever it was, it retired as often as it came, awed in its turn, he thought, by the sweet innocence of that golden head. A late moon rose down over the low side of the earth as he still sat there; he knew it by the strange coppery light that began to glow through the vapors that yet filled the gulfs beneath, and boil them to a scum of dark, dun gold; then at last a broad beam parted the tumbling and sulphurous fogs, and the bright, thin crescent of the waning moon cut itself out on a clear air behind the horn of the hill, and, as if swinging from its sharp cusp, hung the watery diamond of the morning star. Still Reymund did not lift the head from his shoulder; he chose rather that the fair apparition of daybreak at this height above the earth might happen to him, as if through the imposition of that dear and tender touch. By and by she stirred restlessly,--the spell of her slumber was breaking; he moved away gently and left her the rock for a pillow. When the heavens were paling and retreating in a mist of star-breath, and when all the world was whitening about her and the great floor of cloud beneath was inwrought by dawn with sparks of fire, so that they seemed wrapped in an atmosphere of flame and snow, Orient awoke. No hero in his self-restraint, in one wild, forgetful moment of that morning, Reymund told Orient that he loved her. She repulsed him so gently that it gave him reason to hope, yet so firmly that he could do nothing but despair.