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And there in the starlight, under the wide-gnarled pines, sighing loith the wind, Helen sat with Dale on the old stone that an avalanche of afrom the rampart above to serve as camp-table and bench for lovers in the wilderness; the sweet scent of spruce rance of wood-smoke blown in their faces Hohite the stars, and calle task! A coyote yelped off on the south slope, dark now as ht A bit of weathered rock rolled and tapped from shelf to shelf And the wind moaned Helen felt all the sadness and mystery and nobility of this lonely fastness, and full on her heart rested the supreme consciousness that all would some day be ith the troubled world beyond

"Nell, I'll homestead this park," said Dale "Then it'll always be ours"

"Homestead! What's that?" overnive land tocabin"

"And come here often Paradise Park!" whispered Helen

Dale's first kisses were on her lips then, hard and cool and clean, like the life of the e and unutterable joy of the hour, and rendering her h, and her voice with its old ht breeze And the cowboy's "Aw, Bo," drawling his reproach and longing, was all that the tranquil, waiting silence needed

Paradise Park was living again one of its roer to that lonely fastness Helen heard in the whisper of the wind through the pine the old-earth story, beautiful, ever new, and yet eternal She thrilled to her depths The spar-pointed spruces stood up black and clear against the noble stars All that vast solitude breathed and waited, charged full with its secret, ready to reveal itself to her tremulous soul