Then the hour came when he reached his limit.  He must begin his revelation.

“You never ask me anything—­let alone about myself,” he said.

“I’d like to hear,” she replied, timidly.

“Do I strike you as an unhappy man?”

“No, indeed.”

“Well, how do I strike you?”

This was an entirely new tack he had veered to.

“Very good and kind to us women,” she said.

“I don’t know about that.  If I am so, it doesn’t bring me happiness. . . .  Do you remember what I told you once, about my being a preacher —­disgrace, ruin, and all that—­and my rainbow-chasing dream out here after a—­a lost girl?”

“I—­remember all—­you said,” she replied, very low.

“Listen.”  His voice was a little husky, but behind it there seemed a tide of resistless utterance.  “Loss of faith and name did not send me to this wilderness.  But I had love—­love for that lost girl, Fay Larkin.  I dreamed about her till I loved her.  I dreamed that I would find her—­my treasure—­at the foot of a rainbow.  Dreams! . . .  When you told me she was dead I accepted that.  There was truth in your voice.  I respected your reticence.  But something died in me then.  I lost myself, the best of me, the good that might have uplifted me.  I went away, down upon the barren desert, and there I rode and slept and grew into another and a harder man.  Yet, strange to say, I never forgot her, though my dreams were done.  As I toiled and suffered and changed I loved her—­if not her, the thought of her—­more and more.  Now I have come back to these walled valleys—­to the smell of pinyon, to the flowers in the nooks, to the wind on the heights, to the silence and loneliness and beauty.  And here the dreams come back and she is with me always.  Her spirit is all that keeps me kind and good, as you say I am.  But I suffer, I long for her alive.  If I love her dead, how could I love her living!  Always I torture myself with the vain dream that—­that she might not be dead.  I have never been anything but a dreamer.  And here I go about my work by day and lie awake at night with that lost girl in my mind. . . .  I love her.  Does that seem strange to you?  But it would not if you understood.  Think.  I had lost faith, hope.  I set myself a great work—­to find Fay Larkin.  And by the fire and the iron and the blood that I felt it would cost to save her some faith must come to me again. . . .  My work is undone —­I’ve never saved her.  But listen, how strange it is to feel—­now—­ as I let myself go—­that just the loving her and the living here in the wildness that holds her somewhere have brought me hope again.  Some faith must come, too.  It was through her that I met this Indian, Nas Ta Bega.  He has saved my life—­taught me much.  What would I ever have learned of the naked and vast earth, of the sublimity of the wild uplands, of the storm and night and sun, if I had not followed a gleam she inspired?  In my hunt for a lost girl perhaps I wandered into a place where I shall find a God and my salvation.  Do you marvel that I love Fay Larkin—­that she is not dead to me?  Do you marvel that I love her, when I know, were she alive, chained in a canyon, or bound, or lost in any way, my destiny would lead me to her, and she should be saved?”