“She’s great, ain’t she?” asked Bob Flick.

Seagreave nodded.  He had never seen her superior in technique.  It took character, he appreciated that, to have endured the years of tiresome, mechanical practice, and to have undertaken it so intelligently that she had achieved her marvelous results; and she had, beside, youth and beauty and magnetism.  All this alone would have made her a great dancer, but as he recognized, she had more, much more to bring to her art; a complex nature which, in its unsounded depths ever held a vision of beauty, and a sense of this vision which amounted to unity with it, and therefore gave her the power of expressing it.  Her mind, too, was plastic to all primitive impulses and to Nature; she blended with it.  She was but little influenced by persons, her will was too dominating, her intelligence too quick, and—­but here his analysis ceased.

The Pearl was dancing to Hugh’s strange music, she was dancing the desert for him—­Seagreave.  He knew it was for him, although she never glanced in his direction.  And as she danced, he grew to realize that this feat was not an intellectual one.  She was not portraying the spirit of the desert as gleaned from study and observation and melted in the crucible of her poetic imagination and molded by her fancy until it was a thing of form in her thought.  The Black Pearl danced the desert because in her was the power to be one with it and live in its life through every cell of her being.  It was a matter of feeling with her, one phase of her affinity with the forces of earth; but because she had the artist’s constructive imagination, she could put it into form and dance it, and by projecting her own feeling into it, convey it to others.

The world with its round of outworn, hackneyed appeals, its wearisome repetitions of crude and commonplace joys, its tawdry and limited temptations, had long ago fallen away from Seagreave—­and left him nothing, but to-night a voice that he had long ignored, the voice of life, commanded him.

“If the desert seems forever to claim her own, what is that to you!  Your work is to reclaim and in the face of a thousand defeats and desolations still to reclaim, with the eternal faith that for you the wastes shall blossom like the rose.  Work, no matter how brokenly, how futilely.  To build houses of sand is better than to sit in profitless dreams and live in an animal content.”

When later he drove Pearl up the mountainside, almost in silence, as they had come, after his few words of admiration and appreciation of her dancing, there was a shadow for the first time in Harry’s clear eyes, a shadow which did not pass.

CHAPTER XI

Had Gallito but known it, his theory of the unexpected was never more perfectly demonstrated than it was upon the night Pearl danced and in the days which followed.  Hanson had left early the next morning with the firm determination of returning almost immediately accompanied by one or more detectives and of securing that much coveted prize, Jose.  Also, he gloated over the prospect of seeing Gallito, Bob Flick and Seagreave arrested for conniving at Jose’s escape and for harboring him during all these months.