"
"Oh," cried the girl, "what a vivid picture! I seem to
see it."
"Its major axis," he went on, his voice sinking almost
to a caress, "is formed by the Rocky Mountains, which
are practically a prolongation of the Cordilleran Range.
It is drained," he continued--
"How splendid!" said the girl.
"Yes, is it not? It is drained by the Mississippi, by
the St. Lawrence, and--dare I say it?--by the Upper
Colorado."
Somehow his hand had found hers in the half gloaming,
but she did not check him.
"Go on," she said very simply; "I think I ought to hear
it."
"The great central plain of the interior," he continued,
"is formed by a vast alluvial deposit carried down as
silt by the Mississippi. East of this the range of the
Alleghanies, nowhere more than eight thousand feet in
height, forms a secondary or subordinate axis from which
the watershed falls to the Atlantic."
He was speaking very quietly but earnestly. No man had
ever spoken to her like this before.
"What a wonderful picture!" she murmured half to herself,
half aloud, and half not aloud and half not to herself.
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