High,
lean-flanked mountains they were, not clad in forests, but rather
bristling with a stubby growth of the few trees which might endure in
precarious soil and bitter weather, but now they gathered the dignity of
distance about them. The grass of the foothills was a faint green mist
about their feet, cloaks of exquisite blue hung around the upper masses,
but their heads were naked to the pale skies. And all day long, with
deliberate alteration, the garb of the mountains changed. When the
sudden morning came they leaped naked upon the eye, and then withdrew,
muffling themselves in browns and blues until at nightfall they covered
themselves to the eyes in thickly sheeted purple--Tyrian purple--and
prepared for sleep with their heads among the stars.
Something of all this came to Doctor Randall Byrne as he rode, for it
seemed to him that there was a similarity between these mountains and
the girl beside him. She held that keen purity of the upper slopes under
the sun, and though she had no artifice or careful wiles to make her
strange, there was about her a natural dignity like the mystery of
distance. There was a rhythm, too, about that line of peaks against the
sky, and the girl had caught it; he watched her sway with the gallop of
her horse and felt that though she was so close at hand she was a
thousand miles from him. She concealed nothing, and yet he could no more
see her naked soul than he could tear the veils of shadow from the
mountains.
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