and hang together.  Well, the law—­well, you know the law isn’t just exactly that way.  But it’s a beautiful thing if you just hang to the principles, and don’t believe too much of the practice.  The law is disgraced—­but at bottom what the law meant to do was to give humanity some sort of a square deal; which, of course, it doesn’t.  It ain’t a science; but I love it, because it might have been.”

He fell silent once again for a time, after his fashion, but now his gaze was softened, although he went on with his light speech.  “I rather thought I would take up the science of the law as the most possible line of activity for a man of my attainments.  I began to read a little on the side.  Then I didn’t know whether to have contempt for us fools who live and endure the eternal folly, or whether I ought to pity Basswood Junction and Princeton, because life is all so awfully hard and hopeless.  Meantime, Old Mr. World went right on—­didn’t stop to ask me anything.

“You can understand these things took a little time.  Meantime, my dad had sized me up as one more young man ruined by college life.  The old man had a heap of sense in him, and he did the right thing.  He told me to go to the devil.”

“So you came West?”

“So I came West.  Same pants.”

“But you haven’t told me about the girl,” said I, quietly.

Ah, that was it, then!  I could see his eyelids twitch.  A moisture broke out on his lower lip, in that country where perspiration was so little known.  “And you!” he said.  “But then, it didn’t take much brains to guess that.  It was the same way with you.  We all of us came here to Heart’s Desire because some time, some where, there was a Girl.”

So now we both were silent.  Indeed, all the world was silent.  The calm valley lay unwinking in the sun.  The grave mountains stood about unperturbed, unagitated, calm.  The blue sky swept above, peaceful, unflecked by any moving cloud.  There was not a leaf in all that land to give a rustle, nor any water which might afford a ripple.  It was a world silent, finished, past and beyond life and its frettings, with nothing to trouble, and with nothing which bade one think of any world gone by.  Here was no place for memories or dreams.  The rush of another world might go on.  Folk might live and love, grieve and joy, and sorrow and die, and it mattered nothing.  These things came not to Heart’s Desire.

Presently Dan Anderson was guilty of a thing revolutionary, horrible!  He sat silent as long as he could, but at length there broke from him a groan that was half a sob.  He rose and flung out an arm at the great blue heaven.  “Girl!” he cried.  “Girl!” Then he sank down, burying his face in his hands.  One might have heard falling, faint and far off, the shattered crystals of the walls that had long hedged sacredly about the valley of Heart’s Desire.  One might have heard, sweeping the soft and silken curtains of its oblivion, the rough rush of a disturbing wind!