"They'll go by ways that wind deep into the mountains. It's wonderful there, peaks and peaks and peaks, and down the gorges and up over the passes, the trails go that only the trappers and the Indians know. They'll pass lakes as smooth as glass and green as this hollow we're in. You never saw such lakes, everything's reflected in them like a mirror. And after a while they'll come to the beaver streams and Zavier'll set his traps. At night they'll sleep under the stars, great big stars. Did you ever see the stars at night through the branches of the pine trees? They look like lanterns. It'll seem to be silent, but the night will be full of noises, the sounds that come in those wild places, a wolf howling in the distance, the little secret bubbling of the spring, and the wind in the pine trees. That's a sad sound, as if it was coming through a dream." The girl stirred and forgot her skirt. The solemn beauty that his words conjured up called her from her petty irritation. She looked at the mountains, her face full of a wistful disquiet. "And it'll seem as if there was no one else but them in the world. Two lovers and no one else, between the sunrise and the sunset. There won't be anybody else to matter, or to look for, or to think about. Just those two alone, all day by the river where the traps are set and at night under the blanket in the dark of the trees." Susan said nothing. For some inexplicable reason her spirits sank and she felt a bleak loneliness. A sense of insignificance fell heavily upon her, bearing down her high sufficiency, making her feel that she was a purposeless spectator on the outside of life. She struggled against it, struggled back toward cheer and self-assertion, and in her effort to get back, found herself seeking news of less picturesque moments in Lucy's lot. "But the winter," she said in a small voice like a pleading child's, "the winter won't be like that?" "When the winter comes Zavier'll build a hut. He'll make it out of small trees, long and thin, bent round with their tops stuck in the ground, and he'll thatch it with skins, and spread buffalo robes on the floor of it. There'll be a hole for the smoke to get out, and near the door'll be his graining block and stretching frame to cure his skins. On a tree nearby he'll hang his traps, and there'll be a brace of elkhorns fastened to another tree that they'll use for a rack to hang the meat and maybe their clothes on. They'll have some coffee and sugar and salt. That's all they'll need in the way of eatables, for he'll shoot all the game they want, _les aliments du pays_, as the fur men call it. It'll be cold, and maybe for months they'll see no one. But what will it matter? They'll have each other, snug and warm way off there in the heart of the mountains, with the big peaks looking down at them. Isn't that a good life for a man and a woman?"