For a long time Argyl made no answer, but, rising, stood looking far out into the misty obscurity, as though she would look beyond to-day and deep into the future for an answer to many things.  The short twilight passed, the warm colors in the west faded, the breeze of a moment ago died down in faint and fainter whispers, the stars grew brighter, ever more thick-set, in the wide arch of the heavens.

“I hope that you are right,” she said, slowly, at last.  And then, with a queer little laugh which jarred upon Conniston strangely:  “I am getting fanciful, I suppose, and faint-hearted!  Never has our undertaking seemed so big to me; never have the obstacles loomed so high.  I find myself waking up with a start night after night from some horrible dream that the water has failed in the mountains, or that Oliver Swinnerton has stolen all of our men, or that Bat Truxton has gone over to the opposition!  Oh, I know that I am foolish.  For, as you say, we can’t fail.  Everything has got to come out right!  And now,” in the manner native and natural to her—­frank, hearty, even eager—­“I am going to tell you some good news.  In the first place, I see that I have been doing nothing too long, and that always makes one morbid, I think.  I am going to get back to work.  Isn’t that good news?  It is to me, at least.  And, secondly, I have made a discovery.  You’d never guess.”

Conniston shook his head.  “What is it?”

“What,” she asked him, laughingly, and yet with a serious note in her voice, “is the one thing which we should like to discover here?  If a good old-style genie straight from between the covers of the Arabian Nights were to drop down in front of you and say, ’Name the thing which thou wouldst have, and thou shalt have it!’ what would that thing be?”

And Conniston, with his thoughts upon the Great Work, knowing that her thoughts were with his there, answered quickly: 

“Water!  But that is impossible!”

“My secret—­yet,” she answered him.  “I had not meant to say anything about it so soon.  Promise to say nothing about it until I give you leave, and I’ll tell you a little—­oh, a very little—­about my secret.”

Conniston promised, and she went on, speaking swiftly, earnestly: 

“It was last week.  I was riding out into the desert to the north of here—­no matter how far—­when I came upon it.  It is a spring.  Oh, not much of a spring to look at it.  Just a few square feet of moist soil, here and there a sprig of drying grass, three or four brown willows.  But those things mean that there is water there.  How it came there while all of the rest of the desert so far as we know it is bone-dry does not matter so much as what can we do with it? I hardly dare hope,” she finished, thoughtfully, “that my spring is going to prove a factor in our irrigation scheme.  But I hope that it may help to supply us here with drinking-water, water for our horses.  That in itself would mean a good deal, wouldn’t it, Mr. Conniston?”