lody, score after score, product of the
greatest composers of the world, she gave to a listener who never
definitely realized what privilege had been his. She slipped on and
on, forgetting herself, revelling, dreaming; and it was proof at least
of the Alice Strowbridge which might have been, that there came to her
fingers and her throat that night no sound of cheap sensuous melody, no
florid triviality from any land. With a voice which had mastered the
world, she sang the best of the masters of the world. So music, with
all its wooing, its invitation, its challenge, its best appeal, for a
time filled and thrilled this strange auditorium, until forsooth later
comers might, as was the story, indeed have found jewels caught there
in the chinks of the rude-hewn walls.

All at once the voice of the artist, the subsidiary voice of the piano
broke, dropped, and paused. And then, with no more interlude, that
great instrument, a perfect human voice, in the throat of a perfect
human woman, swept gently into the melody of the old song of "Annie
Laurie." At the beginning of it there was a schoolgirl of Georgia, and
a freighter of the Plains, and at the end of it there was a woman with
bowed head, and a man silent, whose head also was bowed.

Neither of the two in the great room heard the footfalls of one who
approached in the dusk across the puncheon floor of the wide gallery.
Dan Andersen, for reasons of his own, had also come on up the trail to
the hotel. Perhaps he intended to make certain inquiries; but he never
got even so far as the door. The voice of Donatelli caught and held
him as it had her other auditor. He stopped midway of the gallery,
listened to the very last note, then turned and quietly stole away,
returning to the lonely bivouac beneath the pines. He started even at
the whisperings of the trees, as he threw down his blankets beside the
little fire. He could not sleep. A face looked at him out of the
dark, eyes gazed down at him, instead of stars, out of the heavens.
The night, and the stars, and the pines, and the desert wind reproached
him for his faithlessness to themselves as comforters; but abjectly he
admitted he could make no plea, save that he had heard once more of a
Face that was the Fairest.

He heard the sound of slow footsteps after a time. It was Tom Osby,
who came and sat down by the fire, poking tobacco into his pipe with a
crooked finger, and smoking on with no glance at the recumbent