She went with him to his fishing rock, and sat watching him. The rock was tall, higher than his head when he stood. It jutted out halfway across the stream, and the water flowed round it in quick foam, and fell into a pool. He caught several fish; but the sun was getting high, and after a time it was plain the fish had ceased to rise.

Yet still he stood casting in silence, while she sat by and watched him. Across the stream, the horses wandered or lay down in their pasture. At length he said with half a sigh that perhaps they ought to go.

“Ought?” she repeated softly.

“If we are to get anywhere to-day,” he answered.

“Need we get anywhere?” she asked.

Her question sent delight through him like a flood. “Then you do not want to move camp to-day?” said he.

She shook her head.

At this he laid down his rod and came and sat by her. “I am very glad we shall not go till tomorrow,” he murmured.

“Not to-morrow,” she said. “Nor next day. Nor any day until we must.” And she stretched her hands out to the island and the stream exclaiming, “Nothing can surpass this!”

He took her in his arms. “You feel about it the way I do,” he almost whispered. “I could not have hoped there’d be two of us to care so much.”

Presently, while they remained without speaking by the pool, came a little wild animal swimming round the rock from above. It had not seen them, nor suspected their presence. They held themselves still, watching its alert head cross through the waves quickly and come down through the pool, and so swim to the other side. There it came out on a small stretch of sand, turned its gray head and its pointed black nose this way and that, never seeing them, and then rolled upon its back in the warm dry sand. After a minute of rolling, it got on its feet again, shook its fur, and trotted away.

Then the bridegroom husband opened his shy heart deep down.

“I am like that fellow,” he said dreamily. “I have often done the same.” And stretching slowly his arms and legs, he lay full length upon his back, letting his head rest upon her. “If I could talk his animal language, I could talk to him,” he pursued. “And he would say to me: ‘Come and roll on the sands. Where’s the use of fretting? What’s the gain in being a man? Come roll on the sands with me.’ That’s what he would say.” The Virginian paused. “But,” he continued, “the trouble is, I am responsible. If that could only be forgot forever by you and me!” Again he paused and went on, always dreamily. “Often when I have camped here, it has made me want to become the ground, become the water, become the trees, mix with the whole thing. Not know myself from it. Never unmix again. Why is that?” he demanded, looking at her. “What is it? You don’t know, nor I don’t. I wonder would everybody feel that way here?”

“I think not everybody,” she answered.

“No; none except the ones who understand things they can’t put words to. But you did!” He put up a hand and touched her softly. “You understood about this place. And that’s what makes it--makes you and me as we are now--better than my dreams. And my dreams were pretty good.”

He sighed with supreme quiet and happiness, and seemed to stretch his length closer to the earth. And so he lay, and talked to her as he had never talked to any one, not even to himself. Thus she learned secrets of his heart new to her: his visits here, what they were to him, and why he had chosen it for their