ofty self-abasement. They were ungrateful,
unworthy. His eye fell upon two letters propped up on his table in a
manner so conspicuous as to suggest a knowledge of his preoccupation--as
if some one were calling him out of his reverie in an offensively loud
voice. He turned the address downward, and busied himself in putting to
rights the articles which John had piled up to attract his tardy notice.
He would read his letters, of course, but not in his present mood: that
would be a species of sacrilege, he patronizingly informed his restive
conscience.

And he did read them later, after he had carefully folded the gray shawl
and placed it out of his range of vision--half a score of closely
written pages filled with gentle girlish analysis of the writer's love
and its unique manifestations, and ending with a tepid interest in the
"queer people" among whom her lover's lot was cast. "It is very hard, my
dear," she wrote, "to think of you in that lonely place, cut off from
everybody and everything interesting; but we must bear it bravely,
since it is to make you strong and well."

Palmerston held the letter in his hand, and looked steadily through the
tent window across the sea of fog that had settled over the valley.

"After all, she is not selfish," he reflected; "she has nothing to gain
by saving Dysart, except"--he smiled grimly--"her rascally father's good
name."

* * * * *

The rains were late, but they came at last, blowing in soft and warm
from the southeast, washing the dust from the patient orange-trees and
the draggled bananas, and luring countless green things out of the brown
mould of the mesa into the winter sun. Birds fledged in the golden
drought of summer went mad over the miracles of rain and grass, and
riotously announced their discovery of a new heaven and a new earth to
their elders. The leafless poinsettia flaunted its scarlet diadem at
Palmerston's tent door, a monarch robbed of all but his crown, and the
acacias west of the Dysart dooryard burst into sunlit yellow in a
night.

The rains had not been sufficient to stop work on the tunnel, and John
watched its progress with the feverish eagerness of an inexperienced
gambler. Now that it was fairly under way, Brownell seemed to lose
interest in the result, and wandered, satchel in hand, over the
mountain-side, leaving fragments of his linen duster on the thorny
chaparral, and devising new schemes for the enrichment of