“Then, I will try to make clear all that father said.  You were the image of your father—­a smile and a square chin.  The smile could charm and the chin could kill.  He liked you for some things that seemed to spring from another source, as he called it; but these would vanish and in the end you would be like your father, as he knew when he saw you break Pedro Nogales’s arm.  And you gloried in your strength; as you told me on the pass and as I saw for myself in the duel.  And to you, father said, victory was the supreme guerdon of life.  It ran triumphant and inextinguishable in your veins.”

“I—­” he said, chokingly; but remembered his promise not to argue.

“Any opposition, any refusal excited your will to overcome it in the sheer joy of the exercise of your strength.  This had been your father’s story in everything, even in his marriage.”

She paused.

“There is nothing more?  No further light on his old relations with my father and mother?” he asked.

“Only a single exclamation, ’It’s not in the blood for you to believe in Jack Wingfield, Mary!’ And after that he turned silent and moody.  I pressed him for reasons.  He answered that he had told me enough.  I had to live my own life; the rest I must decide for myself.  I knew that I was hurting him sorely.  I was striking home into that past about which he would never speak, though I know it still causes him many days of suffering.”

“But on the 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.