Forgetting her errand to the office, she rushed back to David, to safety, to the sheltering folds of the little white cottage tent.

He questioned her curiously about her experience, and although she tried to evade the harsher points, he drew every word from her reluctant lips.

“Lunger,—­and bugs,—­and chasers,—­it doesn’t sound nice, David.”

“But maybe it is the best thing after all.  We are not used to it yet, but I suppose it is better for them to take it lightly and laugh and be funny about it.  They have to spend a lifetime with the specter, you know,—­maybe the joking takes away some of the grimness.”

Carol shivered a little.

“Aren’t you going to the office?”

“No, I am not.  If Mrs. Hartley wants to see me, she can come here.  I am scared, honestly.  Let’s do something.  Let’s go to bed, David.”

It was a two-roomed cottage, a thin canvas wall separating the rooms.  There were window-flaps on every side, and conscientiously Carol left them every one upraised, although she had goose-flesh every time she glanced into the black wall of darkness outside the circle of their lights, a wall only punctuated by the yellow rays of light here and there, where the more riotous guests of the institution were dissipating up to the wicked hour of nine o’clock.

“Good night, David,—­you will call me if you want anything, won’t you?” And Carol leaped into bed, desperately afraid a lizard, or a scorpion or a centipede might lie beneath in wait for unwary pink toes once the guarding lights were out.

This was the land where health began,—­the land of pure light air, of clear and penetrating sunshine, the land of ruddy cheeks and bounding blood.  This was the land which would bring color back to the pale face of David, would restore the vigor to his step, the ring to his voice.  It was the land where health began.

She must love it, she would love it, she did love it.  It was a rich, beautiful, gracious land,—­gray, sandy, barren, but green with promise to Carol and to David, as it had been to thousands of others who came that way with a burden of weakness buoyed by hope.

A shrill shriek sounded outside the tent,—­a dangerous rustling in the sand, a crinkling of dead leaves in the corners of the steps, a ring, a roar, a wild tumult.  Something whirled to the floor in David’s room, papers rattled, curtains flapped, and there was a metallic patter on the uncarpeted floor of the tent.  Carol gave an indistinct murmur of fear and burrowed beneath the covers.

It was David who threw back the blankets and turned on the lights.  Just a sand-storm, that was all,—­a common sand-storm, without which New Mexico might be almost any other place on earth.  David’s Bible had been whirled from the window-ledge, and fine sand was piling in through the screens.

Carol withdrew from the covers most courageously when she heard the comforting click of the electric switch, and the reassuring squeak of David’s feet on the floor of the room.