He knew now she was gone beyond recall. By some malign trick of fate she was probably stating her unalterable resolve over the telephone to his friend at the very moment he was reeling under the shock of MacGonigal's frantic messages with reference to his mother.

Well, be it so! His dream of a life's happiness had been shattered by a thunderbolt from a summer sky, and, crowning misery, here was his mother at death's door, in a state of mind surely aggravated by distress because of uncertainty as to his whereabouts! Sheer despair was again calming if benumbing him when, by ill-chance, his haggard eyes dwelt on Nancy's letter. The concluding words seemed to grip him by the throat:

"I can write no more. My poor heart is breaking." God of mercy, what did it all mean? He gave way utterly. A strong man weeping is a pitiable sight, and Nancy's high resolve might have weakened had she seen him in that bitter hour.

Perhaps she knew. She must have known. Her forlorn soul must have gaged his distress by the measure of her own sorrowful longing. But she had deceived Power so thoroughly that not for many a year did he even guess that her flight was undertaken solely on his account. And it was better so; for the story of their love might have been stained by a sordid tragedy, and Power, instead of going West that night, would have taken a special train to Newport with fixed intent to choke Willard's wretched life out of him. As it was, he crossed two-thirds of the great land which had given him vast wealth, and much tribulation, and little

joy. At New York, and elsewhere en route, he received telegrams from his trusty friend at Bison. They were not reassuring; but they did, at least, contain one grain of comfort in the tidings that his mother still lived.

But therein MacGonigal allowed his heart to control his pen; for Mrs. Power breathed her last before her son had quitted New York, and it was to a town in mourning that Power returned. His mother had endeared herself to every soul in the place. The people looked on her as their guardian angel. They almost scowled on John Darien Power when the flying feet of his horse clattered along the main street in his haste to soothe the fretfulness of a woman who was already three days dead. Why did he leave her? they asked. Where had he hidden that the country should be scoured for him during the last week, and none could find him? He used to be a decent, outspoken sort of fellow, Derry Power; but wealth had spoiled him, as it seemed to spoil every man who secured it. Queer thing! Deponent thought that he, or she, would risk the experiment at the price.

Thus, light-hearted gossip, which talks in headlines, and recks little of the subtler issues of life.

CHAPTER XII

AFTER DARKNESS, LIGHT

DEATH brings peace. Having accomplished its dread mission, it atones to the body from which the soul is snatched by smoothing away the lines of agony from the face; it seems even to relent for awhile, and restore to worn and aged features the semblance of long-vanished youth.

When Power looked at his dead mother, he saw her as she might have looked in placid sleep when he was a boy in San Francisco. But a discovery that is often soothing to those who are bereft of their nearest and dearest brought him no consolation. His stupor of grief and misery was denied the relief of tears. Rather did his brooding thought run to the other extreme. The mother he loved was at rest-why should he not join her? He believed, like many another man who has passed through the furnace of a soul-destroying passion, that he had drunk the flame-wreathed cup of life to the dregs. The fiery potion had swept through his veins and reduced him to ashes. He was no longer even the recluse of the Dolores Ranch, finding in books solace for a lost love, but the burnt-out husk of his former self. What was there left, that he should wish to live? Why should he not end it all, and seek the kindly oblivion of the grave?

Ever stronger and more insistently did this idea

take root in his mind, and some evil monitor seemed to bellow it at him when he stood next day in the cemetery, and saw the coffin lowered into the earth. The beautiful words of the burial service give sorely needed help to stricken hearts; but this man's ears were closed to their solemn promise.

"I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."

The minister's voice, hitherto broken and tremulous, for he held the dead woman in much esteem, and her loss was grievous to him, rang out with a new confidence when it declaimed that splendid passage; yet Power was conscious only of a desire to cry aloud in frenzied protest. Then that phase passed; the tumult died down; he shrank into a lethargy which was infinitely more dangerous than a state of wild revolt.

In that black mood he was watched unceasingly by faithful friends. MacGonigal and Jake were never far from his side. Though he did not know of, and would have angrily resented, their quiet guardianship, he could not have taken his own life just then, and the time was yet far distant when he would ask himself in wonder and thankfulness how he had escaped death by his own hand during the first dreary hours following his return to Bison.

But there were other influences at work, and one of these made its presence felt speedily. After the funeral he was sitting alone in the room which he had converted into a library. His unseeing eyes were fixed on the smiling landscape into which irrigation had converted the once arid ranch. A troop of brood mares,

with foals at heel, were emulating mankind by neglecting the lush pastures at their feet and craning their graceful necks over a palisade to nibble the thorn hedge it protected. This double barrier shut off the lawn and garden from the meadow lands. Here and there the green of apple orchards, planted with artistic regard to open vistas, was already flecked with golden fruit. Soon the reapers would be busy on the sections where maize and oats and wheat were ripening. The lowing of cattle announced that milking-time was near; for, among her other activities, Mrs. Power had established a model dairy, and it was her gentle boast that she had made it pay; thus bringing out in the mother the money-coining instincts which the son had developed so unexpectedly.

Such a scene might well lull the beholder to rest; but Power was blind to its charms. He was reviewing, in an aimless way, the associations which that very apartment held for him. Changed though it was out of all semblance to the poverty-stricken living-room of the ranch, Nancy's spirit had never been wholly exorcised. He pictured her slim and lissome figure as she had stood with him at the window many an evening, and watched the purple shadows stealing over the hills. In that room she had married Marten. From a bamboo stand near one of the windows she had taken the spray of white heather which formed her wedding bouquet. Why had she never mentioned it to him? Or were the last five weeks nothing but some disordered vision of the imagination, a delusion akin to those glimpses of palm-laden oases and flashing waters which come to thirst-maddened wanderers in deserts?