er, and slide round his neck to clasp there. He was powerless to
inhibit the picture. And what he felt then was boundless, unutterable.
No woman had ever yet so much as clasped his hand, and heretofore no
such imaginings had ever crossed his mind, yet deep in him, somewhere
hidden, had been this waiting, sweet, and imperious need. In the bright
day he appeared to ward off such fancies, but at night he was helpless.
And every fancy left him weaker, wilder.

When, at the culmination of this phase of his passion, Dale, who
had never known the touch of a woman's lips, suddenly yielded to the
illusion of Helen Rayner's kisses, he found himself quite mad, filled
with rapture and despair, loving her as he hated himself. It seemed as
if he had experienced all these terrible feelings in some former life
and had forgotten them in this life. He had no right to think of her,
but he could not resist it. Imagining the sweet surrender of her lips
was a sacrilege, yet here, in spite of will and honor and shame, he was
lost.

Dale, at length, was vanquished, and he ceased to rail at himself, or
restrain his fancies. He became a dreamy, sad-eyed, camp-fire gazer,
like many another lonely man, separated, by chance or error, from what
the heart hungered most for. But this great experience, when all its
significance had clarified in his mind, immeasurably broadened his
understanding of the principles of nature applied to life.

Love had been in him stronger than in most men, because of his keen,
vigorous, lonely years in the forest, where health of mind and body were
intensified and preserved. How simple, how natural, how inevitable! He
might have loved any fine-spirited, healthy-bodied girl. Like a tree
shooting its branches and leaves, its whole entity, toward the sunlight,
so had he grown toward a woman's love. Why? Because the thing he revered
in nature, the spirit, the universal, the life that was God, had created
at his birth or before his birth the three tremendous instincts of
nature--to fight for life, to feed himself, to reproduce his kind. That
was all there was to it. But oh! the mystery, the beauty, the torment,
and the terror of this third instinct--this hunger for the sweetness and
the glory of a woman's love!

CHAPTER XVI

Helen Rayner dropped her knitting into her lap and sat pensively gazing
out of the window over the bare yellow ranges of her uncle's ranch.

The winter day was bright, but steely, and the wind th