desire, for a moment at least, to possess it
utterly. But these things belonged to the dark places where brute nature
wrought her spells. And there were other beauties, other enchantments,
and of these, what could Tira, her mind moulded by the brutal influences
of her life, see, except as dreams of her own, not as having wholesome
correspondences in the mind of man? Could she guess what the appeal of
her loveliness would meet in Raven? Fastidious standards, pride of
honor, pride of race. The jungle, in itself, was as hateful to him as it
could be to her, who had been dragged through its fetid undergrowth with
a violence that had cut indelible marks into her. But for him, Raven--as
Nan believed she knew him and as Tira, her striving mind obscured by the
veil of her remembered past, could never know--hadn't the jungle
something for him beyond choking savors and fierce destructive poisons?
Didn't he know that even that miasma nourished wholesome virtues,
strength, abstinence, infinite compassion, if you crossed the horrible
expanse to the clear air beyond? Tira, fair as her mind was in its
untouched integrity, hated the jungle, but it was a part of the wrong
life had done her that she could not, highly as she worshiped Raven,
keep herself from seeing his kinship to the natural earth as Martin's
kinship with it, Tenney's--all the beasts who had desired her. How to
tell her that? How to tell her that although it was most loving of her
to save Raven from the curse she believed to be upon all men, he would
save himself?

"They think," Tira continued, in a voice rough enough to hurt the ear,
"there's suthin' about me--different. An' they feel as if, if they owned
me body an' soul they'd be--I dunno what they'd be."

"They think they'd be gods," Nan's mind supplied. "You are beauty, Tira.
You are the cup. They think if they could drink of you they would never
thirst again."

"An' now," said Tira, "s'pose a man like--like him--s'pose it looked to
him some minute he never'd so much as expected--s'pose it looked to him
as if he'd be made if he owned me body an' soul. Well! That's easy, you
say. If I love him, what's my body an' what's my soul? Offer 'em to him,
quick. An' wouldn't I, if that was all? Wouldn't I?"

She called it sharply, in an angry challenge.

"Yes," said Nan quietly, "I know you would."

"Well," said Tira, "what then? It wouldn't be any more"--her eyes,
glancing here and there in troubled search for help in