“But I ain’t told you that yet,” the corners of Pearl’s mouth were dimpling.

“No, and, by George, until you do I stay right here.”

“Look!” she cried with a change in her voice.  They had entered a canon, where palms grew and involuntarily they drew up their horses to gaze at the sight before them.  The stately, exotic palms lifted their shining green fronds to the blue, intense, illimitable sky, flooded with the gold of sunshine, and beyond them was the background of the mountains, their dark wooded slopes climbing upward until they reached the white, dazzling peaks of snow.

The sharp and apparently impossible contrasts, the magic illusions of color made it a land of remote enchantment, even to the most unimaginative.  And to Hanson the world outside became as unreal as a dream that is past.  Here was beauty, and the wide, free spaces of nature, where every law of man seemed puny, ineffectual and void.  In this unbounded, uncharted freedom the shackles of conventionality fell from him.  Here was life and here was love.  He was a primitive man, and here, before him in visible form, stood the world’s desire.  Barriers there were none.  A man and woman, both as vital as the morning, and love between them.  The craving heart of the eternal man rose up in Hanson, imperatively urging him to claim his own.

He drew his hand across his brow almost dazedly.  “Whew!” he muttered, “I kind of remember when I was a kid that my mother used to tell me about the Garden of Eden.  I thought it was a pipe dream, but, George! it’s true—­it’s true, and I can’t quite believe it.”

The Pearl stood leaning against a great palm tree.  She seemed hardly to hear him.  Her eyes were on the waving, shimmering horizon line of the desert.  Her face held a sort of wistful dreaming.

“‘The Garden of Eden!’” she repeated.  “I’ve heard of it, too.  It was a place where you were always happy, but”—­still wistfully—­“I haven’t found that place yet.”  She turned her vaguely troubled eyes on him and then sighed and drooped against the tree.

“You can have things as you please, if you’ll come to me.”  His speech was rapid, hard-breathing; it was as if he hardly knew what he was saying, but was talking merely to relieve the tension.  “I’m boss and I can manage that you shall dance when you please, and come back here for a little breathing spell whenever you want.  But,” with an impatient gesture, “I ain’t here to talk business.  That’s what I came to Paloma for—­business.  That’s all I was before I met you, just a cold, hard business proposition.  I guess I was pretty hard-headed.  They seemed to think so in my line, anyway.  I thought I knew it all.”  He gave a short laugh.  “I’m not so young.  I thought I knew life pretty well—­had kind of wore it out, in fact.  I thought I’d loved more than one woman; but I know now that I’ve never loved, never lived before, that I’ve just woke up, here in this Garden of Eden.