That morning she faced herself in the mirror and asked, “Now—­what do I owe you?” It was not her voice that answered.  It was beyond her.  But it said:  “Go on!  You are cut adrift.  You are alone.  You owe none but yourself! . . .  Go on!  Not backward—­not to the depths—­but up—­upward!”

She shuddered at such a decree.  How impossible for her!  All animal, all woman, all emotion, how could she live on the cold, pure heights?  Yet she owed something intangible and inscrutable to herself.  Was it the thing that woman lacked physically, yet contained hidden in her soul?  An element of eternal spirit to rise!  Because of heartbreak and ruin and irreparable loss must she fall?  Was loss of love and husband and children only a test?  The present hour would be swallowed in the sum of life’s trials.  She could not go back.  She would not go down.  There was wrenched from her tried and sore heart an unalterable and unquenchable decision—­to make her own soul prove the evolution of woman.  Vessel of blood and flesh she might be, doomed by nature to the reproduction of her kind, but she had in her the supreme spirit and power to carry on the progress of the ages—­the climb of woman out of the darkness.

Carley went out to the workmen.  The house should be completed and she would live in it.  Always there was the stretching and illimitable desert to look at, and the grand heave upward of the mountains.  Hoyle was full of zest for the practical details of the building.  He saw nothing of the havoc wrought in her.  Nor did the other workmen glance more than casually at her.  In this Carley lost something of a shirking fear that her loss and grief were patent to all eyes.

That afternoon she mounted the most spirited of the mustangs she had purchased from the Indians.  To govern him and stick on him required all her energy.  And she rode him hard and far, out across the desert, across mile after mile of cedar forest, clear to the foothills.  She rested there, absorbed in gazing desertward, and upon turning back again, she ran him over the level stretches.  Wind and branch threshed her seemingly to ribbons.  Violence seemed good for her.  A fall had no fear for her now.  She reached camp at dusk, hot as fire, breathless and strengthless.  But she had earned something.  Such action required constant use of muscle and mind.  If need be she could drive both to the very furthermost limit.  She could ride and ride—­until the future, like the immensity of the desert there, might swallow her.  She changed her clothes and rested a while.  The call to supper found her hungry.  In this fact she discovered mockery of her grief.  Love was not the food of life.  Exhausted nature’s need of rest and sleep was no respecter of a woman’s emotion.

Next day Carley rode northward, wildly and fearlessly, as if this conscious activity was the initiative of an endless number of rides that were to save her.  As before the foothills called her, and she went on until she came to a very high one.