“I understand.  And since we have drunk to the Great Work, shall we drink to a Great Soul who is a vital part of it?  I don’t know how we’d manage without Tommy Garton.”

They touched glasses gravely and drank to a man who, as they sat looking out upon life through long, glorious vistas, dawn-flushed, lay alone upon his cot, his face buried in his arms.

They finished their meal, cleared away the dishes together, and still Mr. Crawford had not come.  Then Conniston dragged two of the chairs out to the front porch, took a cigar from the jar where it had been kept moist with half an apple, and they went out to enjoy the cool freshness of the evening.  The sun had sunk out of sight, the mood of the desert had changed.  All of the dull gray monotone was gone.  All the length of the long, low western horizon the dross of the garish day was being transmuted by the alchemy of the sunset into red and yellow gold, molten and ever flowing, as though spilled from some great retort to run sluggishly in a gleaming band about the earth.

A little wandering breeze had sprung up, and went whispering out across the dim plains.  It swirled away the smoke from Conniston’s cigar; he saw it stir a strand of hair across Argyl’s cheek.  The glory of the desert was still the wonderful thing it had been, but it was less than the essential, vital glory of a girl.  Suddenly a great desire was upon him to call out to her, to tell her that he loved her more than all of the rest of life, to make her listen to him, to make her love him.  And with the rush of the desire came the thought, as though it were a whispered voice from the heart of the desert:  “What are you that you should speak so to her. What have you done to make you worthy of this woman? You, a laggard, as frivolous a thing until now as a weathercock, and by no means so useful a factor in the world, your regeneration merely begun; she the Incomparable Woman!”

It was Argyl who spoke first, and only after nearly an inch of white ash had formed at the end of Conniston’s cigar.

“People who do not understand—­they are aliens to whom the desert has never spoken!—­ask why father gives the best part of a ripe manhood to a struggle with such a country.  Does not an evening like this answer their question?  No people in the world can so love their land as do the children of the desert.  For when they have made it over they are still a part of it and it has become a part of them.”

He told her all that he could of the work and Truxton and the men, going into detail as he found that she followed him, that Tommy Garton had not exaggerated when he had said that she knew every sand-hill and hollow.  She listened to him silently, only now and then asking a pertinent question, her eyes upon his face as she leaned forward in her chair, her hands clasped about her knees.  And when he had finished he found that his cigar had long since gone out and that she was smiling at him.