The track which they followed came again to the edge of a brook which they had been crossing and re-crossing now for two days. And they knew from the limpid clearness of the water and the slight thread of its rapid flow that they must be near its headwaters. Across its little valley, straight in front of them, stood a thin wall of tall, handsome maple trees, which thickened and deepened into a heavy green bank of solid forest as either end of the line ran up to the enclosing heights above the valley. The cool, sharp breath of a hidden mountain lake came down to them, and Donahue smartened up his gait. As they came up to where they could see through the fringe of trees, Augusta looked one long moment and drew in a deep breath of delight and pure joy in beauty. A quick grasp of her hand on Jimmie's arm made him stop the horse. But before he could say a word she was out over the wheel and running through the trees, crying: "It's ours, Jimmie! All alone ours! Nobody told us about it! We found it all for ourselves. It is all our own!" When Jimmie caught up to her on the bank of the little lake, she hugged him excitedly and then waved her arm out over the water. "Oh, isn't it the darling! A beautiful white diamond lying deep in its cushion of green velvet!" Jimmie admitted quietly that the little five-pointed lake, lying like a precious white jewel embedded in the deep green setting of the wooded hills, was the most beautiful thing that he had ever seen. The mantle of ready speech seemed to have dropped from him. He had no words with which to answer Augusta's enthusiasm. He stood holding her arm, silent so long that Augusta wondered and looked up at him, with a question. "This is the end," he answered quietly, "of our wanderings. Here are your Hills of Desire." Augusta nodded, but she did not answer in words. And Wardwell, watching, saw that strange, strained, listening look come into her eyes--the look that used to frighten him in the days of her trial. The look did not trouble him now, for he could place against it the healthy, rugged browned beauty of Augusta's supple body. Her hold upon earth and the things of life did not seem at all so slender as it had in those days when he had almost feared that she would slip away from him into that strange border land into which she peered and from which she certainly brought back knowledge. Now as he held her arm, firm and warm and strong with the weeks of sunshine and wind and freedom, he smiled at his fears of those other days and nights. But when she spoke she startled him more thoroughly with the quiet certainty of her fore-knowledge than she had ever done in those other days by her strained and timid glances into the future. "We shall stay here through the winter," she said, in the even voice of a dream, "for I can see the snow on the hillsides and the lake lying wrapped in ice. But then we will be driven away. I do not know why."