"That" happened to be Mount Lassen, belching forth a stupendous column of ashes and smoke. Up, up, up it went, as though it meant to go on and on into infinity. Jack had seen it too often to be affected as he had been that first night. He looked at Marion instead. She was standing with her hands clinched by her side, and her breath sucking in. As the black column mounted higher and higher, she lifted herself to her toes, posing there absolutely unconscious of herself. Jack saw her face grow pale; saw her eyes darken and glow with inner excitement. She was once more the goddess on the mountain top, gazing down at one of the wonders she had wrought. It was as though she pulled that black column up and up and up with the tensity of her desire. The column mushroomed suddenly, rolling out in great, puffy billows before it dipped and went streaming away on the wind. The mountain beneath it spewed sluggish masses of vapor and ashes up into the black moil above, until the whole mountain was obscured and only an angry, rolling cloud churning lumpishly there, told what was hidden beneath. Marion relaxed, took a long, deep breath and settled again to her trim heels. She was not filled with terror as Jack had been; though that may have been because she was not cast up here like a piece of driftwood out of her world, nor was she alone. But Jack paid her the tribute of bowing mentally before her splendid courage. She gazed a while longer, awed ecstasy in her face. Then slowly she swung and stared at that other churning cloud behind her--the crimsoned-tinted cloud of destruction. She flung out both arms impulsively. "Oh, you world!" she cried adoringly, unafraid yet worshipping. "I'd like to be the wind, so I could touch you and kiss you and beat you, and make you love me the way I love you! I'd rather be a tree and grow up here and swing my branches in the wind and then burn, than be a little petty, piffling human being--I would! I'm not afraid of you. You couldn't make me afraid of you. You can storm and rage around all you like. I only love you for it--you beautiful thing!" It made Jack feel as though he had blundered upon a person kneeling in prayer; she was, after all, the goddess she looked, he thought whimsically. At least she had all the makings of a goddess of the mountain top. He felt suddenly inferior and gross, and he turned to leave her alone with her beautiful, terrible world. But manlike he did a frightfully human and earthly thing; he knocked his foot against an empty coal-oil can, and stood betrayed in his purpose of flight. She turned her head and looked at him like one just waking from a too-vivid dream. She frowned, and then she smiled with a little ironical twist to her soft curving lips.