Carol blushed.  “I am not afraid,” she insisted.

“We’ll get a room just the same.  It will be easier for you all the way around.”

Carol flung open the door and gazed out upon the land of health.  The long desolate mesa land stretched far away to the mountains, now showing pink and rosy in the early sunshine.  The little white tents about them were as suggestively pitiful as before.  There were no trees, no flowers, no carpeting grass, to brighten the desolation.

Bare, bleak, sandy slopes reached to the mountains on every side.  David sat up in bed and looked out with her.

“Just a long bare slope of sand, isn’t it?” she whispered.  “Sand and cactus,—­no roses blooming here upon the sandy slopes.”

“Yes, just sandy slopes to the mountains,—­but Carol, they are sunny,—­bare and bleak, but still they are sunny for us.  Let’s not lose sight of that.”

CHAPTER XI

THE OLD TEACHER

“Chicago, Illinois.

“Dear Carol and David—­

“It is most remarkable that you two can keep on laughing away out there by yourselves.  It makes me think perhaps there is something fine in this being married business that sort of makes up for the rest of it.  I think it must take an exceptionally good eyesight to discern sunshine on the slopes of sickness.  If I were traveling that route, I am convinced I should find it led me through dark valleys and over stony pathways with storm clouds and thunders and lightnings smashing all around my head.

“You admonished me to talk about myself and leave you alone.  Well, I suppose you know more about yourselves than I could possibly tell you, and since it is your own little baby sister, I am sure you are more than willing to turn your telescope away from the sunny slopes a while for a glimpse of my business dabbles.

“This is Chicago.

“Aunt Grace was rendered more speechless than ever when I announced my intention of coming, and Prudence was shocked.  But father and I talked it over, and he looked at me in that funny searching way he has and then said: 

“’Good for you, Connie, you have the right idea.  Chicago isn’t big enough to swallow you, but it won’t take you long to eat Chicago bodily.  Of course you ought to go.’

“I know it is not safe to praise men too highly, they are so easily convinced of their astounding virtues, but that time I couldn’t resist shaking hands with father and I said, and meant it: 

“’Father, you are the only one in the world.  I don’t believe even the Lord could make your duplicate.’

“‘Mr. Nesbitt was very angry because I left them’.  He said that after he took me, a stupid little country ignoramus, and made something out of me, my desertion was nothing short of rank ingratitude and religious hypocrisy and treason to the land of my birth.  One might have inferred that he picked me out of the gutter, brushed the dirt off, smoothed my ragged looks, and seated me royally in his stenographic chair, and made a business lady out of me.  But it didn’t work.