The Everlasting Whisper

_Without loving him_! No, thank God; not that! She had always loved him; she loved him now with her whole heart and soul, with an adoration she had saved for him. When in the sp...

It was another nightmare climbing up the cliffs to the cave. He went ahead; he stopped and braced himself; he tautened the rope about her waist and said: "Come on. Slow and care...

"I won't go with you," she cried. "You may beat me; you may kill me if you like, unthinkable brute that you are. I will not follow you now; I will never follow one step ever. I...

She existed through a period of suppressed excitement. If King found cool logic eluding him, Gloria's mind was an orgy of nervous imaginings. She was back with her mother, weepi...

His fellows had drawn closer so that they stood in a ring about the body. One man alone held apart. Gratton's eyes were wild, void of purpose; the dead, chalky-white of his face...

But though this seemed the one consideration of importance in all the world for her just now, in another instant it was swept from her mind, forgotten. Far below her, down in th...

To have followed the pace which he set that day would have broken the heart of any but a seasoned mountaineer. No man in these mountains could have so much as kept him in sight,...

Her heart was beating normally again, the pallor left her face, which became delicately flushed. Her eyes, large and humid, a sweet grey and once more almost childlike--eyes to...

Precisely at one o'clock they were on their way. Gloria caught her own horse, coiled the rope, and mounted. As King rode across the meadow and to the wooded slope beyond she fol...

No, he could not understand that. She saw perplexity in his eyes now. But she did not mean to let him talk yet and it was time for broth again. But again he was whispering:

"I know, I know. But what's a gove'ment? They go busted, don't they, sometimes? Same as folks? Gold don't go busted. There ain't nothin' else like gold. You can tie to it. It wo...

As Gloria fought her way along she was upborne at every step by the expectation of coming presently to their horse, of being placed in the saddle, and of having nothing to do fr...

An absolutely new sense of elation sang through Gloria's blood. She was fully mistress of the situation, and had found within her an unguessed strength. Physically superb at all...

She ran to him and went down on her knees at his bedside, her two hands finding his upon the coverlet, clasping them tight. He looked at her in wonderment; Gloria misread the lo...

And it was his duty, his privilege, and no one's else in the world, to shelter her, to stand between her and all hardship. He put out his arms to take her into them quite as he...

"No wonder she wanted to skip out," jeered Steve Jarrold, his great bony hand locked about Gloria's shrinking shoulder. His ill-featured face, the small, pig eyes, always jeerin...

She wondered if these men were as utterly callous as they seemed. Gratton, so newly dead, appeared forgotten. They laughed and drank, they smoked and spat, they soiled her with...

To-day were three mysteries tremblingly close to revealing themselves one to another: the great green mystery of the woodlands; the mystery of a man clothed in his masculinity a...

Gloria gave him the first dance after his arrival, highhandedly commanding a fair-haired and despondent youth to surrender to King one of his numbers. King caught her into his a...

It was springtime in the California Sierra. Never were skies bluer, never did the golden sun-flood steep the endless forest lands in richer life-giving glory. Ridge after ridge...

She nodded, and he began gathering up coffee-pot, cups, scraps of paper; bits of food he left for bird and chipmunk, but the tin cans were dropped behind an old log and covered...

"No. Ben is in Coloma. Gratton and Miss Gaynor and Mrs. Gaynor would have come up from the city, you know. That means they would have come through Placerville or Truckee."

It is always springtime somewhere in the world! As youth knows and remembers, as age forgets. Always a place somewhere for laughter and love and light hands caressing, for bird...

"Sprang from good old pioneer stock, too, Mark," said Gaynor. "Wouldn't think now, to look at her, that she was born at Gold Run in a family as rugged as yours and mine, would y...

He wanted her with him; she wanted to come. Further, it pained him to think that those first glorious days should be spent with the mountains between them. He was tempted, sorel...

She freed herself, and while he let her go he stood watching her with the new look in his eyes. Scarlet-faced she flashed her look at him from across the table. Then she fled to...

Gloria was not in the cave. He sank back, sure of that. For she should be sleeping close by the fire. Then she had gone down again for wood. He frowned and lay staring upward ag...