ke yours it was--but more like John Prather's. And the
high-sounding preachments about the poverty that might go with fine gowns
became real to me. They were not banal at all. They were simple truth,
free of rhetoric and pretence. I knew that my cry of 'It's not in the
blood' was as true in me as any impulse of yours ever could be in you!"

To the end, under the dominance of her will, she had not faltered; and
with the end she looked up with a faint smile of stoicism and an
invincible flame in her eyes. Anything that he might be able to say would
be as flashing a blade in and out of a blaze. She had become superior to
the resources of barrier or armor, confident of a self whose richness he
realized anew. He saw and felt the tempered fineness of her as something
that would mind neither siege nor prayer.

"I am not afraid," she said, "and I know that you are not. It is all
right!" Then she added, with a desperate coolness, but still clasping the
boa rigidly: "The hotel is only a block away, and to-morrow you will be
back in the store and I shall soon be on my side of the pass."

This was her right word for a situation when his temples were throbbing,
harking back, with time's reversal of conditions, to a situation after
the duel in the _arroyo_ was over and he had used the right word when her
temples were throbbing and her hands splashed. If retribution were her
object, she had repaid in nerve-twitch of torture for nerve-twitch of
torture. The picture that had been alive and out of its frame was back on
cold canvas. Even the girl he had known across the barrier, even the girl
in armor, seemed more kindly. But one can talk, even to a picture in a
frame; at least, Jack could, with wistful persistence.

"You don't mind if I tell you again--if I speak my one continuous thought
aloud again?" he asked. "Mary, I love you! I love you in such a way that
I"--with a faint bravery of humor as he saw danger signals--"I would
build mud-houses all day for you to knock to pieces!"

"Foolish business, Jack!" she answered.

"Or drag a plow."

"Very hard work!"

"Or set out to tunnel a mountain single-handed, with hammer and chisel."

"I think you would find it dreadfully monotonous at the end of the
first week."

He had spoken his extravagances without winning a glance from her. She
had answered with a precision that was more trying than silence.

"_I_ shouldn't find it so if you were in the neighborhood to welcome
me when I kn