“She’s like you in that, Pearl.  My heavens!  I wish you could see yourself this morning.  Beautiful ain’t the word.”

“Am I beautiful, Rudolf?” She lifted her head from his shoulder and looked at him with a soft, childlike expression, as if longing for his praise.

“I guess you know it,” he said adoringly, stroking her shining black hair, “but if you weren’t, if you were as ugly as sin, it wouldn’t make any difference, you’d get us all just the same.  All women like you got to do is to look at a man and he’ll follow you like a sheep.  I don’t know what it is, magnetism or something.”

“But I’m glad I’m not as ugly as sin,” she murmured, in smiling content.  “And I’m glad you’re not, too.”  She reached up her arm and touched his hair caressingly.  “I love that little touch of reddish gold in your hair, and, yes, just that sprinkling of gray, and I love your blue eyes.  I can’t bear dark men.  I am so dark myself.”

“You sure are, Pearl, thank the Lord!  I never was very poetic, but I never see one of these desert nights sparkling with their big stars, twice as big as natural, that I don’t think of you.”

She smiled, delighted at his praise.

“But, goodness!” he went on, “when ain’t I thinking of you?  I tell you, you been on my mind steady these last few days.  Your Pop was so dead sure when I talked to him that you’d have nothing more to do with me that it got to worrying me, and I thought maybe you’d hold it against me that I hadn’t told you about—­about my being already tied up.”  He scanned her face as if fearful of seeing it cloud and change.

It did.  The laughter faded from her eyes, her brow darkened.  “I wish you had told me,” she said, “then I’d been a little better prepared for Pop and Bob; but I guess they got as good as they gave.”

“I know I ought to have told you, Pearl,” he said miserably, “and I meant to, honey, but”—­gathering her more closely in his arms—­“I just couldn’t spoil those first few days; and, anyway, you drove everything but you out of my head.  I just determined every time it came into my mind to tell you, that I wasn’t going to spoil Paradise with any recollections of hell.  Maybe I was all wrong, but that was the way I felt.”

“No, you were all right, Rudolf,” she wound her arms about his neck.  “When the storm came it broke swift and sudden like the sand storm, and we didn’t live it all over beforehand, getting ready for it, and deciding how we’d meet it when it came, and all that.  We just enjoyed ourselves.  Lived and loved up to the moment when it broke, and that was the best way.”

“Gee! was there ever a woman like you!” lifting his glad, gay gaze to the sky.  “Why, Pearl, it most frightens me when I think how happy me and you are going to be together.”

“Are we?” nestling closer to him.  “How?”

“How?” he repeated.  “Why, we’re going to be together first and last; ain’t that enough?  It is for me.  But”—­with drooping head and affectedly humble and dejected mien—­“it couldn’t be expected to be enough for you, could it?”