reason, of intellect, of culture, who had been a good man despite the failure and shame of his life.  And he gave heed to the voice of warning, of conscience.  Not by revengefully seeking the Mormon who had ruined Fay Larkin and blindly dealing a wild justice could he help this unfortunate girl.  This fierce, newborn strength and passion must be tempered by reason, lest he become merely elemental, a man answering wholly to primitive impulses.  In the darkness of that hour he mined deep into his heart, understood himself, trembled at the thing he faced, and won his victory.  He would go forth from that hour a man.  He might fight, and perhaps there was death in the balance, but hate would never overthrow him.

Then when he looked at future action he felt a strange, unalterable purpose to save Fay Larkin.  She was very young—­seventeen or eighteen, she had said—­and there could be, there must be some happiness before her.  It had been his dream to chase a rainbow—­it had been his determination to find her in the lost Surprise Valley.  Well, he had found her.  It never occurred to him to ask Nas Ta Bega how he had discovered that the Sago Lily was Fay Larkin.  The wonder was, Shefford thought, that he had so long been blind himself.  How simply everything worked out now!  Every thought, every recollection of her was proof.  Her strange beauty like that of the sweet and rare lily, her low voice that showed the habit of silence, her shapely hands with the clasp strong as a man’s, her lithe form, her swift step, her wonderful agility upon the smooth, steep trails, and the wildness of her upon the heights, and the haunting, brooding shadow of her eyes when she gazed across the canyon—­all these fitted so harmoniously the conception of a child lost in a beautiful Surprise Valley and growing up in its wildness and silence, tutored by the sad love of broken Jane and Lassiter.  Yes, to save her had been Shefford’s dream, and he had loved that dream.  He had loved the dream and he had loved the child.  The secret of her hiding-place as revealed by the story told him and his slow growth from dream to action—­these had strangely given Fay Larkin to him.  Then had come the bitter knowledge that she was dead.  In the light of this subsequent revelation how easy to account for his loving Mary, too.  Never would she be Mary again to him!  Fay Larkin and the Sago Lily were one and the same.  She was here, near him, and he was powerless for the present to help her or to reveal himself.  She was held back there in that gloomy hall among those somber Mormons, alien to the women, bound in some fatal way to one of the men, and now, by reason of her weakness in the trial, surely to be hated.  Thinking of her past and her present, of the future, and that secret Mormon hose face she had never seen, Shefford felt a sinking of his heart, a terrible cold pang in his breast, a fainting of his spirit.  She had sworn she was no sealed wife.  But had she not lied?  So, then, how utterly powerless he was!