ded high above the
winds. "Stay! It is we who love you, Cyclona and I. Stay with us!"

Cyclona knelt and laid her brown hand across the beautiful eyelids of
the child for a little while.

Then she took Seth's head and pillowing it upon her bosom, rocked
gently back and forth as they knelt alone on the hard cold earth of
the dugout floor.

"It doesn't matter now," she whispered to him; "he knows."

CHAPTER XVII.

[Illustration]

The days are long in the desert. Sometimes they seem to be endless.
When the wind would permit, Seth endeavored to find comfort in digging
in the soil into which we must all descend, in getting near to it, in
ploughing it, often with apparent aimlessness, never being able to
count upon the harvest, but buoying up his soul with hope of the
yield.

But there were days of wind and rain and sleet and cold stormy weather
when all animals of the desert, whether human or four-footed, were
glad to seek their holes in the ground and stay there.

These days Seth spent in building the beautiful house.

He sat before the dim half window, drawing the plan, Cyclona beside
him, watching him.

Sometimes he called her Cyclona, and then again he called her Charlie;
for what with his grief and the wail of the wind, his mind had become
momentarily dazed.

Full well Cyclona knew the story of the Magic City, having heard it
again and again, but it was only of late when Seth had given up all
hope of Celia's returning to the dugout that he commenced to plan the
beautiful house.

"When the Wise Men come out of the East," Seth told her, "and buy up
ouah land fo' the Magic City, we shall be rich. It is then that I
shall build this beautiful house, so beautiful that she must come and
live in it with us."

Cyclona leaned over the table on her elbows, looking at the plan. Her
dark eyes were sad, for she knew that by "us," Seth meant Charlie and
himself.

He ran his pencil over the plan, showing how the beautiful house was
to be built. Somewhat after the fashion of a Southern house
modernized. A Southern woman, he explained, must live in a house which
would remind her of her home and still be so beautiful that not for
one instant would she regret that home or the land of her birth which
she had left for it.

"A species of insanity it is," he muttered, "to bring such a woman to
a hole in the ground." He bit his lip and frowned, "fo' theah ah women
in whom the love of home, of country, is pa'amount.