Page:Peak and Prairie (1894).pdf/360

 point, yet mounting always higher above the great plain below. There the prairie stretched away, a hundred miles to the East and South, with never a lake nor a forest to catch the light, with not a cloud in the sky to cast a shadow. Yet over the broad, undulating expanse were lines and patches of varying color, changing and wavering from moment to moment, like mystic currents and eddies upon a heaving, tide-swept sea. Amy watched her companion furtively, ready to take umbrage at any lack of proper appreciation on his part; for this was what she liked best in all Colorado, this vast, mysterious prairie sea. Yet when she saw by Stephen's face that the spell had touched him too, when she noted the rapt gaze he sent forth, as he left his horse to choose his own way, she felt annoyed, unreasoningly, perversely annoyed. Somehow his look was too rapt, he was taking it too solemnly, he was too much in earnest! She had a longing to touch up her horse and gallop off to some spot where she might be unmolested, where she might think her own thoughts and receive her own impressions without seeing them accentuated, exaggerated in another person. There had never been any one before who seemed to feel just as she did about that view, and some-