Do we not all do that?" said Jose dismally. "It is because a man cannot
conceive of a Heaven without a woman in it. He thinks in spite of all
experience to the contrary that she is what makes it Heaven."

"Yes, experience counts for nothing," Gallito sighed for himself and his
brothers.

But if Seagreave sat silent and absorbed when he came to Gallito's cabin
in the evening, it did not bother Pearl. She was an expert in such
symptoms. Sometimes he talked to her in a rather constrained fashion,
but for the most part he sat on the other side of the room, listening to
Hugh's music.

One evening when he sat listening he suddenly lifted his eyes and gazed
at the Pearl, who sat almost the length of the room away from him. The
cabin was lighted only by the great log fire, and the leaping, ardent
flames of the pine, mingled with the soft, glowing radiance of burning
birch, invested the room and its occupants with that atmosphere of
mystery and glamour, essential in flame-illumined shadow. And Hugh was
playing the music the masters dreamed in the twilight hours when silence
and shadow permitted them, even wooed them to a more intimate revelation
of the heart than the definite splendors of daylight inspired.

Beyond the zone of the firelight, the room was all in a warm gloom, rich
and dim. Pearl and Hugh had gathered fir branches, even some young
trees, and had placed them about the walls, and in the warmth their
aromatic, delicious odor permeated and pervaded the cabin, and one
discerning those half-defined branches might easily imagine that the
walls stretched away into the dim forest.

Pearl lay back in an easy chair, her narrow, half-closed eyes on the
leaping flames. The wind, low to-night, the wind of eternity which blows
ever in the mountains, sang about the cabin and blended with Hugh's
music like a faint violin obligato. But even in this soft twilight of
blending and mingling and harmonizing, with pine branches above and
beyond her and shadowed gloom about her, Pearl never for a moment seemed
the spirit of the forest.

With its dim depths for a background, she shone on it, as brilliant and
distinct from it as a flashing jewel on the breast of a nun. Her crimson
frock caught a deeper warmth from the firelight, her black hair shone
like a bird's wing, the jewels on her fingers sent out sparkles of light
and flame. As Saint Harry continued to gaze at her the forest with all
its haunting, dreaming witchery vanished, th