om him.

"Look for me to-morrow about this time," he whispered. "Keep your
nerve.... Good night."

That night Joan dreamed strange, weird, unremembered dreams. The next
day passed like a slow, unreal age. She ate little of what was brought
to her. For the first time she denied Kells admittance and she only
vaguely sensed his solicitations. She had no ear for the murmur of
voices in Kells's room. Even the loud and angry notes of a quarrel
between Kells and his men did not distract her.

At sunset she leaned out of the little window, and only then, with the
gold fading on the peaks and the shadow gathering under the bluff, did
she awaken to reality. A broken mass of white cloud caught the glory
of the sinking sun. She had never seen a golden radiance like that. It
faded and dulled. But a warm glow remained. At twilight and then at dusk
this glow lingered.

Then night fell. Joan was exceedingly sensitive to the sensations of
light and shadow, of sound and silence, of dread and hope, of sadness
and joy.

That pale, ruddy glow lingered over the bold heave of the range in
the west. It was like a fire that would not go out, that would live
to-morrow, and burn golden. The sky shone with deep, rich blue color
fired with a thousand stars, radiant, speaking, hopeful. And there was a
white track across the heavens. The mountains flung down their shadows,
impenetrable, like the gloomy minds of men; and everywhere under
the bluffs and slopes, in the hollows and ravines, lay an enveloping
blackness, hiding its depth and secret and mystery.

Joan listened. Was there sound or silence? A faint and indescribably
low roar, so low that it might have been real or false, came on the soft
night breeze. It was the roar of the camp down there--the strife, the
agony, the wild life in ceaseless action--the strange voice of gold,
roaring greed and battle and death over the souls of men. But above
that, presently, rose the murmur of the creek, a hushed and dreamy flow
of water over stones. It was hurrying to get by this horde of wild men,
for it must bear the taint of gold and blood. Would it purge itself and
clarify in the valleys below, on its way to the sea? There was in its
murmur an imperishable and deathless note of nature, of time; and this
was only a fleeting day of men and gold.

Only by straining her ears could Joan hear these sounds, and when she
ceased that, then she seemed to be weighed upon and claimed by silence.
It was not a