e desert there is no past!" Jack exclaimed.

"Yes, there is, Jack. There is your own heart. On the desert your past is
not shared with others. But to-night, after I received your note, I did
try, for the second time in my life, to share father's. I told him your
request; I spoke of the scene in your drawing-room; I asked him what it
meant. He answered that you must learn from one nearer you than he was,
and that he never wanted to think of that scene again."

It was she who had chosen the direction at the street corners. They were
returning now toward the hotel. The fingers which had been playing with
the boa had crumpled the end of it into a ball, which they were gripping
so tightly that the knuckles were little white spots set in a blood-red
background. She was suffering, but determined to leave nothing unsaid.

"Jack, when I said 'It's not in the blood' I was more than repeating my
father's words. They expressed a truth for me. I meant not only rebellion
against what was in you, but against the thing that was in me. Why, Jack,
I do not even remember my own mother! I have only heard father speak of
her sadly when I was much younger. Of late years he has not mentioned
her. He and the desert and the garden are all I have and all I know; and
probably, yes--probably I'm a strange sort of being. But what I am, I am;
and to that I will be true. Father went to the desert to save my life;
and broken-hearted, old, he is greater to me than the sum of any worldly
success. And, Jack, you forget--riding over the pass so grandly with your
impulses, as if to want a thing is to get it--you--but we have had good
times together; and, as I said, you belong on one side of the pass and I
on the other. This and much else, which one cannot see or define, is
between us. From the day you came, some forbidding influence seemed at
work in my father's life and mine; and when you had gone another man,
with your features and your smile, came to Little Rivers; one that I
understand even less than you!"

Jack recalled the references to the new rancher by Bob Worther on the day
of his departure for the East and, later, in Jim Galway's letter. But he
did not speak. Something more compelling than his promise was keeping him
silent: her own apprehension, with its story of phantoms of her own.

"And yesterday I saw your father's face," she went on, "as it appeared in
the doorway for a second before he saw my father and was struck with
fear, and how li