There was a smile of vast complacency on Charmian’s lips as she looked away from him off through the towering pines. She wondered if she loved this boy, who carried his heart so openly on his coatsleeve. He certainly was attractive in his handsome young manhood. He would make an ardent lover. But what else, she wondered? He seemed to do little or no thinking for himself. He just took life lightly and let things slide, never worrying, never striving for anything, never revealing any depth of soul in any of his varied moods. His family was well off, and he did not have to work. Neither did she have to work, for that matter; but she did work. She worked her mind. She pondered over many things. She forced herself into deep reveries, reveries which were not consumed with egotism. She thought of life and the problems of humanity, and always she strove to think constructively. And thinking is the hardest work that one can do. Andy loved her--or thought he did. Quite well was she aware of that. And it pleased her. She wanted fine young men to love her. She could not help it. She--_they_--are born that way. Would men have it otherwise? But Dr. Shonto! The radiance with which the morning had endued her transparent skin was heightened by the glowing thought. If she had swayed Shonto, either by her physical or her mental or her plain womanly charms, or all these combined (herself, in short), she had made a conquest to be proud of. Of course to marry him was out of the question entirely. The gulf of years was between them. But it was warmly satisfactory for her to realize that a man of his importance had entered into her novel little game of make-believe discovery, and that he had not decided to come until she had assured him that she was serious in her desire to undertake the trip. And she was in nowise depressed over the thought that there was the remote possibility of her being in the wilds, on the great, romantic adventure of which she had dreamed so many times, with two seemly men who both were in love with her. Born romancer that she was, Charmian Reemy could not have pictured, in her most fantastic dreams, a situation more likely to add a wondrous and thrilling page to a life that she had long ago decided to make as novel as she could. On up the trail the party forged, the labouring burros ahead, nibbling at this and that prospective edible along the way. The sun climbed high and sucked the frost from the stiff, chilled leaves. A clear sky overhung the mountains, and all was still. A stone clattering into a deep cañon made much ado, for the reverberations of its fall came hollowly to the listeners’ ears. The bark of a squirrel as he revelled in the doubtful warmth of the autumn sun was heard for miles, for the mountains were steeped in that solemn hush that almost seems to sigh for another summer that has gone, a hush that bespeaks resignment to the dead days of winter yet to come.