joy in the very texture of them. He never dreamed for a
moment that she took a delight in those rather crumpled and dirty bills.
He merely took it for granted that she exulted in the visible expression
of appreciation of her art.

"And what will you do with it?" he asked.

"I will send it to my bank when I can get any letters through, and then
when this snowball is big enough I will invest it."

"In mines?" still idly interested and smiling.

She shook her head. "I leave that to my father, he is a good judge and
he is lucky at it, and my mother is always buying patches of land and
trading them off, usually to good advantage. But my specialty is unset
stones. I have some very good ones, really, I have. Oh," with a little
glance over her shoulder toward her father and Jose, "I will show them
to you some day when Jose is not around. If he knew I had them he would
steal them just for the pleasure of keeping himself in practice."

"How you love beauty," he said.

"But they are valuable," she said. "Oh, yes, I love them, too. I love to
let them fall through my fingers, to pour them from one hand to another.
Sometimes, when I am all alone here in the cabin, I sit and I open my
little black leather bag and take them out and hold them in the palm of
my hand, and I turn them this way and that way just to catch the light,
and there is nothing so beautiful; in all the world there is nothing so
beautiful as jewels, except," she caught herself quickly, "the desert,
of course."

He sighed a little and stirred restlessly, the very mention of the
desert made him vaguely uneasy. He had listened to the call of the
mountains and obeyed it, and from that moment the desert, like the
world, had no place in his thoughts; but since the night that Pearl had
danced it had remained in his mind, and had become to him as a far
horizon. The desert has ever been a factor in the consciousness of man,
not to be excluded, and although Seagreave did not realize it, the
moment had come in which he must reckon with it. He felt the fascination
and repulsion of its impenetrable mystery, of its stark and desolate
wastes, whose spell is yet so potent in the imagination of man, that
many have found in its barren horror the very heart of beauty. He
wondered if the uncontaminated winds which blew from out the ages across
the vast, empty spaces murmured a message of greater import than that
whispered to him among the mountain tops, if the wings of light whi