Gallito waved his hand with a polite gesture.  “You know more of him and his lessons than I, Jose.  I am always ready to grant that.”  He took another sip of cognac, blew a succession of smoke wreaths toward the ceiling, and again resumed his midnight philosophizings.  “What puzzles me, Jose, is what is going to become of us in Heaven.  We shall never be content.  Content is a lesson that no one has ever learned.  Look at Saint Harry.  He has Heaven right here.  His time to himself, enough to live on without working, no women to bother him, your cooking; and it may be on that that you will win an entrance to Heaven; it will certainly be on nothing else.  But, if, as you say, he is interested in my daughter, he is throwing away all chance of keeping Paradise.”

“Do we not all do that?” said Jose dismally.  “It is because a man cannot conceive of a Heaven without a woman in it.  He thinks in spite of all experience to the contrary that she is what makes it Heaven.”

“Yes, experience counts for nothing,” Gallito sighed for himself and his brothers.

But if Seagreave sat silent and absorbed when he came to Gallito’s cabin in the evening, it did not bother Pearl.  She was an expert in such symptoms.  Sometimes he talked to her in a rather constrained fashion, but for the most part he sat on the other side of the room, listening to Hugh’s music.

One evening when he sat listening he suddenly lifted his eyes and gazed at the Pearl, who sat almost the length of the room away from him.  The cabin was lighted only by the great log fire, and the leaping, ardent flames of the pine, mingled with the soft, glowing radiance of burning birch, invested the room and its occupants with that atmosphere of mystery and glamour, essential in flame-illumined shadow.  And Hugh was playing the music the masters dreamed in the twilight hours when silence and shadow permitted them, even wooed them to a more intimate revelation of the heart than the definite splendors of daylight inspired.

Beyond the zone of the firelight, the room was all in a warm gloom, rich and dim.  Pearl and Hugh had gathered fir branches, even some young trees, and had placed them about the walls, and in the warmth their aromatic, delicious odor permeated and pervaded the cabin, and one discerning those half-defined branches might easily imagine that the walls stretched away into the dim forest.

Pearl lay back in an easy chair, her narrow, half-closed eyes on the leaping flames.  The wind, low to-night, the wind of eternity which blows ever in the mountains, sang about the cabin and blended with Hugh’s music like a faint violin obligato.  But even in this soft twilight of blending and mingling and harmonizing, with pine branches above and beyond her and shadowed gloom about her, Pearl never for a moment seemed the spirit of the forest.