as I am do
not want the smile of your face, the touch of your hand! We gave for
womanhood! Pass on to lesser men who loved the fleshpots and who would
buy your charms! So Carley interpreted that slight gesture, and writhed
in her abasement.

Rust threw a white, illuminating light upon her desertion of Glenn. She
had betrayed him. She had left him alone. Dwarfed and stunted was
her narrow soul! To a man who had given all for her she had returned
nothing. Stone for bread! Betrayal for love! Cowardice for courage!

The hours of contending passions gave birth to vague, slow-forming
revolt.

She became haunted by memory pictures and sounds and smells of Oak Creek
Canyon. As from afar she saw the great sculptured rent in the earth,
green and red and brown, with its shining, flashing ribbons of
waterfalls and streams. The mighty pines stood up magnificent and
stately. The walls loomed high, shadowed under the shelves, gleaming in
the sunlight, and they seemed dreaming, waiting, watching. For what? For
her return to their serene fastnesses--to the little gray log cabin. The
thought stormed Carley's soul.

Vivid and intense shone the images before her shut eyes. She saw the
winding forest floor, green with grass and fern, colorful with flower
and rock. A thousand aisles, glades, nooks, and caverns called her
to come. Nature was every woman's mother. The populated city was a
delusion. Disease and death and corruption stalked in the shadows of
the streets. But her canyon promised hard work, playful hours, dreaming
idleness, beauty, health, fragrance, loneliness, peace, wisdom, love,
children, and long life. In the hateful shut-in isolation of her room
Carley stretched forth her arms as if to embrace the vision. Pale close
walls, gleaming placid stretches of brook, churning amber and white
rapids, mossy banks and pine-matted ledges, the towers and turrets and
ramparts where the eagles wheeled--she saw them all as beloved images
lost to her save in anguished memory.

She heard the murmur of flowing water, soft, low, now loud, and again
lulling, hollow and eager, tinkling over rocks, bellowing into the deep
pools, washing with silky seep of wind-swept waves the hanging willows.
Shrill and piercing and far-aloft pealed the scream of the eagle. And
she seemed to listen to a mocking bird while he mocked her with his
melody of many birds. The bees hummed, the wind moaned, the leaves
rustled, the waterfall murmured. Then came the sh