As Jack left the hotel entrance he was walking in the treadmill mechanics of a prisoner pacing a cell, without note of his surroundings, except of dim, moving figures with which he must avoid collision. The phantoms of his boyhood, bulky and stiflingly near, had a monstrous reality, yet the ghostly intangibility that mocked his sword-thrusts of tortured inquiry. At length his distraction centered on the fact that he and his father were to dine alone that evening.

They dined alone regularly every Wednesday, when Jack made a report of his progress and received a lesson in business. It was at the last council of this kind that John Wingfield, Sr. had bidden his son to bring all questions and doubts to him. Now Jack hailed the weekly function as having all the promise of relief of a surgeon's knife. Fully and candidly he would unburden himself of every question beating in his brain and every doubt assailing his spirit.

By the time that he was mounting the steps of the house his growing impatience could no longer bear even the delay of waiting on dinner. When he entered the hall he was the driven creature of an impelling desire that must be satisfied immediately.

"Will you ask my father if he will see me at once?" he said to the butler.

"Mr. Wingfield left word that he had to go into the country for the night," answered the butler. "I am sorry, sir," he added confusedly, in view of the blank disappointment with which the information was received.

In dreary state Jack dined by himself in the big dining-room, leaving the food almost untouched. At intervals he was roused to a sense of his presence at table by the servant's question if he should bring another course. Without waiting for the last one, he went downstairs to the drawing-room, and standing near the "Portrait of a Lady," again poured out his questions, receiving the old answer of "I give! I give!" which meant, he knew, that she had given all of herself to him. Saying after saying of hers raced through his mind without throwing light on the mystery, which had the uncanniness of a conspiracy against him.

And after his mother, Mary had influenced him more than any other person. She had brought life to the seeds which his mother had planted in his nature. That new life could not die, but without her it could not flourish. Her cry of "It's not in the blood!" again came echoing to his ears. What had she meant? The question sent him to the Ewolds' hotel; it sent this note up to her room:

"MARY:

"In behalf of old desert comradeship, if I were in trouble wouldn't you help me all you could? If I were in darkness and you could give me light, would you refuse? Won't you see me for a few moments, if I promise to keep to my side of the barrier which you have raised between us? I will wait here in the lobby a long time, hoping that you will.

"JACK."

"All the light I have to give. I also am in darkness," came the answer in a nervous, impulsive hand across a sheet of paper; and soon Mary herself appeared from the elevator, not in the fashion of the Avenue, but in simple gray coat and skirt, such as she wore at home. She greeted him in a startled, half-fearful manner, as if her presence were due to the impulsion of duty rather than choice.

"Shall we walk?" she asked, turning toward the door in the welcome of movement as a steadying influence in her evident emotion.

There they were in the old rhythm of step of Little Rivers companionship on a cross-town street. He saw that the costly hat that he had selected for her in the display of a shop-window after all was not the equal of the plain model with a fetching turn to the brim and a single militant feather, which she wore that evening. The light feather boa around her neck on account of the cool night air seemed particularly becoming. He was near, very near, her, so near that their elbows touched; but the nearness was like that of a picture out of a frame which has come to life and may step back into cold canvas at any moment. Oh, it was hard, in the might of his love for her, not to forget everything else and cry out another declaration, as he had from the canyon! But her face was very still. She was waiting for him to begin, while her fingers were playing nervously with the tip of her boa.

"I must be frank, very frank," he said.

"Yes, Jack, or why speak at all?"

"From the night of my arrival in Little Rivers, when the Doge at once recognized who I was without telling me, I saw that, under his politeness and his kindness, he was hostile to my presence in Little Rivers."

"Yes, I think that in a way he was," she answered.

"I was conscious that something out of the past was between him and me, and that it included you in a subtle influence that nothing could change. And this afternoon, while you were at the house and my father came to the drawing-room door, I could not help noticing how the Doge was overcome. You noticed it, too?"

"Yes, I never saw my father in such anger before. It seemed to me that he could have struck down that man in the doorway!" There was a perceptible shudder, but she did not look up, her glance remaining level with the flags.

"And on the pass you said, 'It's not in the blood!'" he continued. "Yes, almost in terror you said it, as if it spelled an impassable gulf between us. Why? why? Mary, haven't I a right to know?"

As he broke off passionately with this appeal, which was as the focus of all the fears that had tormented him, they were immediately under the light of a street lamp. She turned her head toward him resolutely, in the mustering of her forces for an ordeal. Her face was pale, but there was an effort at the old smile of comradeship.

"Yes, as I said, the little light that I have is yours, Jack," she began. "But there is not much. It is, perhaps, more what I feel than what I know that has influenced me. All that my father has ever said about you and your father and your relations to us was the night after I returned from the pass ahead of you, when you had descended into the canyon to frighten me with the risk you were taking."

"I did not mean to frighten you!" he interjected. "I only followed an impulse."

"Yes, one of your impulses, Jack," she remarked, comprehendingly. "Father and I have been so much together—indeed, we have never been apart—that there is more than filial sympathy of feeling between us. There is something akin to telepathy. We often divine each other's thoughts. I think that he understood what had taken place between us on the pass; that you had brought on some sort of a crisis in our relations. It was then that he told me who you were, as you know. Then he talked of you and your father—you still wish to hear?"

"Yes!"

"And you will listen in silence?"

"Yes!"

"I will grant your defence of your father, but you will not argue? I am giving what you ask, in justice to myself; I am giving my reasons, my feelings."

"No, I will not argue."

Their tones were so low that a passer-by would have hardly been conscious that they were talking; but had the passer-by caught the pitch he might have hazarded many guesses, every one serious.

"Then, I will try to make clear all that father said. You were the image of your father—a smile and a square chin. The smile could charm and the chin could kill. He liked you for some things that seemed to spring from another source, as he called it; but these would vanish and in the end you would be like your father, as he knew when he saw you break Pedro Nogales's arm. And you gloried in your strength; as you told me on the pass and as I saw for myself in the duel. And to you, father said, victory was the supreme guerdon of life. It ran triumphant and inextinguishable in your veins."

"I—" he said, chokingly; but remembered his promise not to argue.

"Any opposition, any refusal excited your will to overcome it in the sheer joy of the exercise of your strength. This had been your father's story in everything, even in his marriage."

She paused.

"There is nothing more? No further light on his old relations with my father and mother?" he asked.

"Only a single exclamation, 'It's not in the blood for you to believe in Jack Wingfield, Mary!' And after that he turned silent and moody. I pressed him for reasons. He answered that he had told me enough. I had to live my own life; the rest I must decide for myself. I knew that I was hurting him sorely. I was striking home into that past about which he would never speak, though I know it still causes him many days of suffering."

"But on the desert there is no past!" Jack exclaimed.

"Yes, there is, Jack. There is your own heart. On the desert your past is not shared with others. But to-night, after I received your note, I did try, for the second time in my life, to share father's. I told him your request; I spoke of the scene in your drawing-room; I asked him what it meant. He answered that you must learn from one nearer you than he was, and that he never wanted to think of that scene again."

It was she who had chosen the direction at the street corners. They were returning now toward the hotel. The fingers which had been playing with the boa had crumpled the end of it into a ball, which they were gripping so tightly that the knuckles were little white spots set in a blood-red background. She was suffering, but determined to leave nothing unsaid.

"Jack, when I said 'It's not in the blood' I was more than repeating my father's words. They expressed a truth for me. I meant not only rebellion against what was in you, but against the thing that was in me. Why, Jack, I do not even remember my own mother! I have only heard father speak of her sadly when I was much younger. Of late years he has not mentioned her. He and the desert and the garden are all I have and all I know; and probably, yes—probably I'm a strange sort of being. But what I am, I am; and to that I will be true. Father went to the desert to save my life; and broken-hearted, old, he is greater to me than the sum of any worldly success. And, Jack, you forget—riding over the pass so grandly with your impulses, as if to want a thing is to get it—you—but we have had good times together; and, as I said, you belong on one side of the pass and I on the other. This and much else, which one cannot see or define, is between us. From the day you came, some forbidding influence seemed at work in my father's life and mine; and when you had gone another man, with your features and your smile, came to Little Rivers; one that I understand even less than you!"

Jack recalled the references to the new rancher by Bob Worther on the day of his departure for the East and, later, in Jim Galway's letter. But he did not speak. Something more compelling than his promise was keeping him silent: her own apprehension, with its story of phantoms of her own.

"And yesterday I saw your father's face," she went on, "as it appeared in the doorway for a second before he saw my father and was struck with fear, and how like yours it was—but more like John Prather's. And the high-sounding preachments about the poverty that might go with fine gowns became real to me. They were not banal at all. They were simple truth, free of rhetoric and pretence. I knew that my cry of 'It's not in the blood' was as true in me as any impulse of yours ever could be in you!"

To the end, under the dominance of her will, she had not faltered; and with the end she looked up with a faint smile of stoicism and an invincible flame in her eyes. Anything that he might be able to say would be as flashing a blade in and out of a blaze. She had become superior to the resources of barrier or armor, confident of a self whose richness he realized anew. He saw and felt the tempered fineness of her as something that would mind neither siege nor prayer.

"I am not afraid," she said, "and I know that you are not. It is all right!" Then she added, with a desperate coolness, but still clasping the boa rigidly: "The hotel is only a block away, and to-morrow you will be back in the store and I shall soon be on my side of the pass."

This was her right word for a situation when his temples were throbbing, harking back, with time's reversal of conditions, to a situation after the duel in the arroyo was over and he had used the right word when her temples were throbbing and her hands splashed. If retribution were her object, she had repaid in nerve-twitch of torture for nerve-twitch of torture. The picture that had been alive and out of its frame was back on cold canvas. Even the girl he had known across the barrier, even the girl in armor, seemed more kindly. But one can talk, even to a picture in a frame; at least, Jack could, with wistful persistence.

"You don't mind if I tell you again—if I speak my one continuous thought aloud again?" he asked. "Mary, I love you! I love you in such a way that I"—with a faint bravery of humor as he saw danger signals—"I would build mud-houses all day for you to knock to pieces!"

"Foolish business, Jack!" she answered.

"Or drag a plow."

"Very hard work!"

"Or set out to tunnel a mountain single-handed, with hammer and chisel."

"I think you would find it dreadfully monotonous at the end of the first week."

He had spoken his extravagances without winning a glance from her. She had answered with a precision that was more trying than silence.

"I shouldn't find it so if you were in the neighborhood to welcome me when I knocked off for the day," he declared. "You see, I can't help it. I can't help what is in me, just as surely as the breath of life is in me."

"Jack!" she flashed back, with arresting sharpness, but without looking around, while her step quickened perceptibly, "suppose I say that I am sorry and I, too, cannot help it; that I, too, have temperament, as well as you;" her tone was almost harsh; "that even you cannot have everything you command; that for you to want a thing does not mean that I want it; that I cannot help the fact that I do not—"

With a quick interruption he stayed the end of the sentence, as if it were a descending blade.

"Don't say that!" he implored. "It is too much like taking a vow that might make you fearfully stubborn in order to live up to it. Perhaps the thing will come some day. It's wonderful how such a thing does come. You see, I speak from experience," he went on, in wan insistence, with the entrance to the hotel in sight. "Why, it is there before you realize it, like the morning sunshine in a room while you are yet asleep. And you open your eyes and there is the joyous wonder, settling itself all through you and making itself at home forever. You know for the first time that you are alive. You know for the first time that you were born into this world merely because one other person was born into it."

"Very well said," she conceded, in hasty approval, without vouchsafing him a glance. "I begin to think you get more inspiration for compliments on this side of the pass than on the other,"—and they were at the hotel door. Precipitately she hastened through it, as if with her last display of strength after the exhaustion of that walk.