The light still beckoned.  The way was heavy with high, drifted sand.  The courage of despair goaded me to the utmost effort.  Forced to pause for breath, I found and leaned against a post.  It was a telegraph pole.  In all the blackness and immeasurable loneliness, it was the solitary sign of an inhabited world.  And the only sound was the wind, as it sang through the taut wires in the unspeakable sadness of minor chords.  A camel caravan came by, soft-footed, silent and inscrutable.  I waited till it passed out to the mysteries of the desert beyond the range of hills.

I began again to climb the path.  It was lighter when I crept through a broken wall and found myself in a stone courtyard, with gilded shrines and grinning Buddhas.  One image more hideous than the rest, with eyes like glow-worms, untangled its legs and came towards me.  I shook with fright.  But it was only the dwarf priest—­a monstrosity of flesh and blood, who kept the temple.  I pointed to the light which seemed to be hanging to the side of the rocks above.  He slowly shook his head, then rested it on his hands and closed his eyes.  I pushed him aside and painfully crawled up the shallow stone stairs, and found a door at the top.  I opened it.  Lying on a stone bed was Jack, white and still.  A woman leaned over him with her hand on his wrist.  Her face was heavily lined with a long life of sorrow.  On her head was a crown of snow-white hair.  She raised her hand for silence.  I fell at her feet a shaking lump of misery.

I could not live through it again, Mate—­those remaining hours of agony, when every second seemed the last for Jack.  But morning dawned, and with the miracle of a new-born day came the magic gift of life.  When Jack opened his eyes and feebly stretched out his hand to me, my singing heart gave thanks to God.

And so the crisis was safely passed.  And the hateful science I believed was taking Jack from me, in the skilful hands of a good woman, gave him back to me.

The one comfort left me in the humiliation of my petty, unreasoning jealousy—­yes, I had been jealous—­was to tell her.

And she, whose name was Edith Bowden, opened to me the door of her secret garden, wherein lay the sweet and holy memories of her lover, dead in the long ago.

For forty long and lonesome years she had unfalteringly held before her the vision of her young sweetheart and his work, and through them she had toiled to make real his ideals.

I take it all back, Mate.  A career that makes such women as this is a beautiful and awesome thing.

In spite of all my pleadings to come with us, Miss Bowden started once again on her lonely way across the wind-swept plains, back to Europe and her work, leaving me with a never-to-be-forgotten humility of spirit and an homage in my heart that never before have I paid a woman.