ty: "power to set waves of influence in
motion which stir the waters on distant shores. That seems to me the
most wonderful thing."

Her vitality, her own sense of power, seemed almost incongruous. She
was so delicately made, so much the dresden-china shepherdess, that
intensity seemed out of relation to her nature. Yet the tiny hands
playing before her with natural gestures like those of a child had,
too, a decision and a firmness in keeping with the perfectly modelled
head and the courageous poise of the body. There was something regnant
in her, while, too, there was something sumptuous and sensuous and
physically thrilling to the senses. To-day she was dressed in an
exquisite blue gown, devoid of all decoration save a little chinchilla
fur, which only added to its softness and richness. She wore no jewelry
whatever except a sapphire brooch, and her hair shone and waved like
gossamer in the sun.

"Well, I don't know," he rejoined, admiration unbounded in his eyes for
the picture she was of maidenly charm and womanly beauty, "I should say
that goodness was a more wonderful thing. But power is the most common
ambition, and only a handful of the hundreds of millions get it in any
large way. I used to feel it tremendously when I first heard the stamps
pounding the quartz in the mills on the Rand. You never heard that
sound? In the clear height of that plateau the air reverberates
greatly; and there's nothing on earth which so much gives a sense of
power--power that crushes--as the stamps of a great mine pounding away
night and day. There they go, thundering on, till it seems to you that
some unearthly power is hammering the world into shape. You get up and
go to the window and look out into the night. There's the deep blue
sky--blue like nothing you ever saw in any other sky, and the stars so
bright and big, and so near, that you feel you could reach up and pluck
one with your hand; and just over the little hill are the lights of the
stamp-mills, the smoke and the mad red flare, the roar of great hammers
as they crush, crush, crush; while the vibration of the earth makes you
feel that you are living in a world of Titans."

"And when it all stops?" she asked, almost breathlessly. "When the
stamps pound no more, and the power is withdrawn? It is empty and
desolate--and frightening?"

"It is anything you like. If all the mills all at once, with the
thousands of stamps on the Rand reef, were to stop suddenly, and the
smo