Poor Isabella Waring!  He had hardly given her a passing thought in twenty years.  And now he had vilified her to help himself out of a tight corner.  Well, she was always a good sort.  She wouldn’t mind being used—­or even misused—­to help out her “old pal” this way.  Still it made him feel mean, and he was glad when the Boy dropped the subject and turned again to his own difficulties.

But the mind of the young prince was restive, that day.  Nothing held his attention long.  It seemed, like his eye, to be roving hither and thither, seeking something it never could find.

“You have been to America, Father Paul, haven’t you?” he asked.

America?  Yes, Verdayne had been to America.  It was in America that he had passed one season of keenest anguish.  He had good reason to remember it—­such good reason that in all their wanderings about the world he had never seen fit to take the Boy there.

But something had aroused the young fellow’s passing interest, and now nothing would satisfy him save that he must hear all about America; and so, for a full hour, as best he could, Verdayne described the country of the far West as he remembered it.

“Nothing in America appealed to me so strongly as the gigantic prairies,” he said at last.  “You were so deeply moved by our trip to Africa, Boy, that you must remember the impression of vastness and infinity the great desert made upon us.  Well, in the glorious West of America it is as if the desert had sprung to life, and from every grain of sand had been born a blade of grass, waving and fluttering with the joy of new birth.  Oh, it is truly wonderful, Paul!  Once I went there with the soil of my heart scorched as dry and lifeless as the burning sands of Sahara, but in that revelation of a new creation, some pulse within me sprang mysteriously into being again.  It could never be the same heart that it once was, but it would now know the semblance of a new existence.  And I took up the burden of life again—­albeit a strange, new life—­and came home to fight it out.  The prairies did all that for me, Boy!” He paused for a moment, and then spoke in a sadder tone.  “It was soon after that, Paul, that I first found you.”

Paul Zalenska thought that he understood.  That, of course, was after Isabella Waring had wrecked his life.  Cruel, heartless Isabella!  He had never even heard her name before to-day, but he hated her, wherever she might be!

“There is a legend they tell out there that is very pretty and appropriate,” went on Verdayne, dreamily.  “They say that when the Creator made the world, He had indiscriminately strewn continents and valleys, mountains and seas, islands and lakes, until He came to the western part of America, and despite His omnipotence, was puzzled to know what new glories He could possibly contrive for this corner of the earth.  Something majestic and mighty it must be, He thought, and yet of an altogether different