On the fourth day Nan planned a coaching party to ascend Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the Land of the Sky, the highest point of ground this side the Rockies. She had taken this trip with Stuart sixteen years before. She was then but fifteen, and he had just begun to dangle at her heels. She did not tell him their destination, but left him to discover for himself that they were travelling over the same old quiet road.

The party consisted of half a dozen boys and girls whom Nan was chaperoning, Stuart, the footman and coachman. The start was made at sunrise. The morning was glorious, the air rich with the full breath of a southern spring. The footman lifted the bugle to his lips, and its music rang over the hills and broke into a thousand echoes as its notes bounded upward from cliff to cliff. The whip cracked over the back of four sleek horses and they were off, amid screams of laughter from the youngsters.

Stuart felt his heart leap with the joy of youth. The rivers and mountains, birds and fields of his native heath were calling once more, and his soul answered with a cry!

At the foot of the first hill the coach suddenly stopped beside the banks of the Swannanoa River.

Nan leaped to the ground, drew Stuart with her to the rear of the coach, and raised her arms.

"Lift me up," she cried, laughing.

He placed his hands under her arms and with a leap and a cry of laughter she was in the empty baggage rack.

"Now up with you!" she cried.

In a moment Stuart was seated snugly by her side and the big red coach was rolling along the old road beside the banks of the laughing river.

"Now, sir," Nan whispered, "do you know where you are going?"

Stuart nodded.

"Where?" she asked, mischievously, as she laid her warm hand with a sudden grip on his.

"To a certain peak among the clouds, where you and I once went a thousand years ago."

Nan nestled a little closer—or perhaps it was the swaying of the coach that made him think she did—and softly said:

"You remember this road?"

"I\'ve seen it a hundred times in my dreams since that wonderful day. It winds along the banks of the Swannanoa for twenty miles, always climbing higher and higher until the river becomes a limpid trout stream. We stop at the old road-house, stay all night, and next morning take the bridle path with the funny pack-horses and climb to the first mountain top, still following the little stream. We stoop to drink from the spring which is the river\'s source—a deep bold spring hung with long festoons of green moss and set with ferns and rhododendron——"

"Fine, Jimmy, fine!" she cried with girlish mockery. "Your geography lesson was perfect! You can walk home with me after school."

Stuart looked at her and broke into a laugh. Again they were boy and girl, and the only change he could see was that she was more splendidly beautiful at thirty-one than she had ever promised to be at fifteen.

The spirit of joy was resistless. He flung to the winds the last shred of conventional dignity as the coach rolled lazily over the rocky road, throwing them from side to side.

"You remember how shocked you were in this same seat, Jim, that day in the sweet long ago when the old coach threw me into your arms?"

"Yes, I felt that I was taking a mean advantage of you."

"I blushed furiously, didn\'t I?"

"Yes, and I wonder now what your real thoughts were; you don\'t remember, I suppose?"

"As distinctly as though it were yesterday," Nan answered, dreamily.

"What did you think of my embarrassment?"

"I thought you were an awful fool not to accept more gracefully and thankfully the providence which threw a pretty girl your way."

The coach gave a sudden lurch and threw her into Stuart\'s arms again.

"And now?" he cried, laughingly, as he held her firmly for a moment, to prevent her falling.

She blushed furiously, threw the ringlets of dark hair from her face and drew back to her position.

"Now, of course, it\'s unlawful," she answered with sober playfulness.

The man watched her slyly for the next half-mile. She was very, very quiet. Was he mistaken in the idea that her body had trembled with unusual violence for the moment he had held her? Or was it the quiver of the coach over the gravel in the road and the swaying of their seat? The sense of danger which the little incident roused was only momentary. The scenes through which they were passing were resistless. He caught the odour of crushed violets from the fence corner and the smell of the young grass broken beneath the hoof of a horse; the ploughman was turning at the end of the row. The low music of the river and the panorama of white fleeting clouds across the blue of matchless southern skies, awoke a thousand memories. Again he was a Southern boy. He heard the laughter of big-mouthed, jolly negroes eating watermelons in the shade of great trees and the song of mocking birds in the stillness of summer nights!

A rabbit ran across the road and he smiled at the recollection of his first hunt. A quail whistled from the tangle of blackberry briars by the roadside. He looked quickly and saw the bob white sitting on the top rail of the old worn fence.

He seized Nan\'s arm.

"Look, Nan!"

She looked and smiled and the tears came unbidden. She turned away a moment and he didn\'t see.

They spent the night at the same old road-house and slept on feather beds. He hadn\'t felt the touch of a feather bed in years. He dreamed that he was at school again, a man of thirty-five, playing marbles with a crowd of towheaded boys and they were beating him at the game while Nan was standing near, her long plait of black hair hanging down her back, laughing at him because he was barefooted! He woke with a groan, shook off the nightmare, and slept soundly until morning.

They started next day at eight o\'clock with the pack-horses to make the trip along the dim bridle trail, fourteen miles up the sides of frowning cliffs and over the tops of balsam-crowned peaks to the summit of Mount Mitchell.

Nan led the way, mounted on a sure-footed young stallion, and Stuart followed her on a little black mule he had selected from the barn for his exact likeness to one he had raised as a pet when a boy. The youngsters came struggling after them, mounted on an assortment of shaggy, scrubby looking animals that knew the mountain path as a rabbit knows his trail in the jungle.

They stopped for luncheon at the spring which forms the source of the Swannanoa and Stuart drank again from its cold limpid waters, while Nan\'s laughter rang in his ears.

At one o\'clock they passed through the first series of clouds and out into the sunlight beyond. The next line of clouds was dark and threatening and suddenly poured rain. Slowly but surely the horses picked their way up the mountain-side through the storm and suddenly walked out into the sunlight again; they looked down on the smooth flat surface of the clouds through which they had passed.

"Glorious!" Stuart cried.

"We didn\'t see this when we came before, you remember," she answered. "It rained all the way up."

"Yes, it rains up here almost every day in the year, but the guide says we\'re going to get a view of six states to-morrow."

It was dusk when the party reached the summit. The horses were loosened to graze in the open field and the guides hurried to build a fire in front of the cave made by a projecting ledge of rock beneath which the party was to sleep.

The bed of balsam boughs was too sharp a contrast to Nan\'s million-dollar-room to permit Stuart much sleep. Besides the youngsters were giggling and laughing and joking most of the night. Only a big log marked the partition wall between the men\'s and women\'s side of the cave. The space was so limited it was necessary to sleep close together. The girls and boys never grew tired cracking silly jokes about the magnificence of their sleeping quarters. In vain Nan begged for quiet. It was three o\'clock before they were still at last and she fell into a deep sleep.

Stuart rose, sat before the log fire and watched the regular rise and fall of her bosom as she slept like a child. On a distant mountain-side he heard the howl of a lonely wolf. Sixteen years ago the mountains were full of them and they came quite close. He was reminded of the narrowing strip of the savage world, fast disappearing before the march of civilization.

"I wonder if we\'ll ever conquer the last jungle—the heart of man?" he mused. "Somehow I have my doubts, and yet the faith never dies."

Again he looked at the sleeping woman and a wave of fierce mad rebellion swept his heart. Somewhere inside of him he heard the lonely cry of another wolf.

"She\'s mine—mine! Nature gave her to me in the morning of life—I was a fool. I should have taken her by force, if need be, and she would have thanked me in after years. She has complied with the conventions of Society and trampled the highest law of Life. Why not smash convention now at the call of that law?"

Again the wolf howled in the distant darkness and it seemed the echo of his own mad cry. He waked from his reverie with an angry start. He shuddered that he could have harboured the thought for a moment.

The eastern horizon was beginning to glow with the dawn. He rose, walked to the summit, and sat down on the pile of stones that marked the grave of Professor Mitchell. He watched in silence until he saw the sun\'s red rim suddenly leap above the blue-black peaks of the east and drive the last shadow of the night from the valleys below. With their fading mists he felt the darkness lift from his own heart and the sunlight of reason stream in. A new joy welled up from the depths of his spirit. He was alive to his finger tips and his imagination glowed with the consciousness that life was strong and clean, and worth while.

"With the help of God I\'ll keep it so, too!" he cried. "I\'m ready for the fight now. Let it come."

He knew instinctively that it was coming. He felt it in every word that had fallen from Nan\'s lips since they left on this trip. He felt it most keenly of all when she was silent, read it in the tremour of her mouth, the shadowy tenderness of her eyes, the low, deep tones of her voice. What he couldn\'t know was how hard that fight was going to be!

Both Nan and the youngsters slept like children until nine o\'clock. He helped the guides prepare breakfast without waking the sleepers and called them at nine.

By ten o\'clock breakfast was over, the guides had formed two exploring parties and set out with the young people chattering and laughing. "We\'ll keep house, Jim, here in God\'s palace among the clouds, until they return."

"Yes," he answered, cheerily, "and it will be fun to keep it alone, won\'t it, with no restraints or studied pretense, no crowd of fools or liveried flunkies near at hand; only these big dark balsams for sentinels."

They sat down on the ledge of rock which formed their cave-house and gazed over the marvellous panorama of a world transformed into blue billowy mountains, flying clouds and turquoise skies. Over it all brooded the deep solemn silence of eternity. Not a sound reached the ear from earth or air. Far up in the sky an eagle poised and looked below in silence. Not a house could be seen as far as the eye could reach; only here and there a white patch on the dark blue mountain-side showed like a farmer\'s scar that hadn\'t healed. These were the fields of farmers on the lower ranges, but their houses were hidden among the trees.

Nan was leaning back on her elbow on the blanket Stuart had spread for her, watching his face change its mood with each flying cloud.

"Our luck is wonderful to-day, Nan," he said at last. "The guides say this is one of the rarest days a traveller ever finds on this peak. We might come a hundred times and never strike it again."

"Why?" she asked lazily.

"The air\'s so crisp and clear. A mountain fifty miles away seems a stone\'s throw. We\'ve but to sweep the horizon with a single turn of the head and see six states of the union. Eastward stretches North Carolina, to the coast, to the north there in that bristling line of lower hills stands old Virginia. To the west loom the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky and southward rise the crags of western Georgia and South Carolina—but it don\'t seem so wonderful to you, I suppose."

"Why not?"

"You must see most of it from your windows every day."

"But not with your eyes, Jim!" she cried. "I have everything and I have nothing. There is no meaning to anything we do or see or possess if the one thing we desire is withheld."

"I might have made that speech, Nan," he said thoughtfully. "It sounds strange on your lips."

"With my houses in town and country, with every whim of body and soul apparently gratified, perhaps it does sound strange. But suppose that all this madness of luxury, at which you wonder, is but the vain effort of a hungry heart?"

The man was silent. The question was too dangerous to try to answer, too dangerous to leave unanswered.

"You haven\'t answered," she insisted.

"No. Answers to such questions don\'t come so glibly here in these silent places, Nan," he responded seriously.

"That\'s why I brought you here," she confessed. "Besides, I knew you loved this wild spot. The memory of your rapture that day, sixteen years ago, has never left me."

"You used to love such places, too," he said looking away over the blue billows. "What deep-toned eternal things they spoke! How small and contemptible the struggle of the insects in those valleys below!"

"Come back to my question," the woman insisted, with quiet determination. "You are not a coward. The time has come in our lives when we should begin to see things as they are."

"I\'ve been trying to do that for a long time," he answered sorrowfully.

"And haven\'t succeeded," she added promptly. "The trouble is, Jim, that life is a tissue of lies. We are born in lies, grow up in lies, live and move and have our being in lies. Our highest wisdom is the law of hypocrisy which we call diplomacy. I\'ve found that society is one living lie. We say \'good morning\' and wis............