“You mean,” she said not quite steadily, “you are going to buy that land?”

“I mean”—­he frowned a little—­“I am going to renew my offer to finance the project for you.  You owe it to David Weatherbee even more than I do.  Go back to that pocket; set his desert blossoming.  It’s your only salvation.”

She groped for the bulwark behind her and moved back to its support.  “I could not.  I could not.  I should go mad in that terrible place.”

“Listen, madam.”  He said this very gently, but his voice carried its vibrant undernote as though down beneath the surface a waiting reserve force stirred.  “I did not tell all about that orchard of spruce twigs.  It was planted along a bench, the miniature of the one we climbed in the Wenatchee Mountains, that was crossed with tiny, frozen, irrigating canals leading from a basin; and midway stood a house.  You must have known that trick he had of carving small things with his pocket-knife.  Then imagine that delicately modeled house of snow.  It was the nucleus of the whole, and before the door, fine as a cameo and holding a bundle in her arms, was set the image of a woman.”

There was a silent moment.  She waited, leaning a little forward, watching Tisdale’s face, while a sort of incredulous surprise rose through the despair in her eyes.  “There were women at Fairbanks and Seward after the first year,” he went on.  “Bright, refined women who would have counted it a privilege to share things, his hardest luck, with David Weatherbee.  But the best of them in his eyes was nothing more than a shadow.  There was just one woman in the world for him.  That image stood for you.  The whole project revolved around you.  It would be incomplete now without you.”

She shrank closer against the bulwark, glancing about her with the swift look of a creature trapped, then for a moment dropped her face in her hands.  When she tried to say something, the words would not come.  Her lips, her whole face quivered, but she could only shake her head in protest again and again.

Tisdale waited, watching her with his upward look from under contracted brows.  “What else can you do?” he asked at last.  “Your tract is too small to be handled by a syndicate, and now that the levels of the Columbia desert are to be brought under a big irrigation project, which means a nominal expense to the grower, your high pocket, unimproved, will hardly attract the single buyer.  Will you, then, plat it in five-acre tracts for the Seattle market and invite the—­interest of your friends?”

She drew erect; the danger signals flamed briefly in her eyes.  “My friends can be dis-interested, Mr. Tisdale.  It has only been through them, for a long time, I have been able to keep my hold.”

“There’s where you made your mistake at the start; in gaining that hold.  When you conformed to their standards, your own were overthrown.”

“That is not true.”  She did not raise her voice any; it dropped rather to a minor note? but a tremor ran over her body, and her face for an instant betrayed how deep the shaft had struck.  “And, always, when I have accepted a favor, I have given full measure in exchange.  But there is an alternative you seem to have overlooked.”