Some note underneath her nonchalance seemed to disturb, even to distress him.  He entered the house and started through the living-room on his way to the library.  But he paused as if in answer to a call from one of the four photographs on the wall, Michael Angelo’s young David, in the supple ease of grace.  The David which Michael made from an imperfect piece of marble!  The David which sculptors say is ill-proportioned!  The David into which, however, the master breathed the thing we call genius, in the bloom of his own youth finding its power, even as David found his against Goliath.

This David has come out of the unknown, over the hills, with the dew of morning freshness on his brow.  He is unconscious of self; of everything except that he is unafraid.  If all other aspirants have failed in downing the old champion, why, he will try.

Now, Jasper Ewold frowned at David as if he were getting no answer to a series of questions.

“I must make a change.  You have been up a long time, David,” he thought; for he had many of these photographs which he kept in a special store-room subject to his pleasure in hanging.  “Yes, I will have a Madonna—­two Madonnas, perhaps, and a Velasquez and a Rembrandt next time.”

In the library he set to reading Professor Giuccamini; but he found himself disagreeing with the professor.

“I want your facts which you have dug out of the archives,” he said, speaking to the book as if it were alive.  “I don’t want your opinions.  Confound it!” he threw Giuccamini on the table.  “I’ll make my own opinions!  Nothing else to do out here on the desert.  Time enough to change them as often as I want, too.”

He went into the garden—­the garden which, next to Mary, was the most intimate thing in his affections.  Usually, every new leaf that had burst forth over night set itself in the gelatine of his mind like so many letterpress changes on a printed page to a proof-reader.  This time, however, a new palm leaf, a new spray of bougainvillea blossoms, a bud on the latest rose setting which he had from Los Angeles, said “Good morning,” without any response from him.

He paced back and forth, his hands clasped behind him, his head bowed moodily, and his shoulders drawn together in a way that made him seem older and more portly.  With each turn he looked sharply, impatiently, toward the door of the house.

Never had Mary so felt the charm of her room as on this morning; never had it seemed so set apart from the world and so personal.  It was the breadth of the ell and the size of her father’s library and bedroom combined.  The windows could hardly be called windows in a Northern sense, for there was no glass.  It was unnecessary to seal up the source of light and air in a dry climate, where a blanket at night supplied all the extra warmth one’s body ever required.  The blinds swung inward and the shades softened the light and added to the privacy which the screen of the growing young trees and creeping vines were fast supplying.  Here she could be more utterly alone than on the summit of the pass itself.  She paused in the doorway, surveying familiar objects in the enjoyed triumph of complete seclusion.