only relief and peace left to her. Stricken by the cruelty
of her fate, she fell back against the stones and gave up to grief.
Nothing was left but fierce pain. The youth and vitality and intensity
of her then locked arms with anguish and torment and a cheated,
unsatisfied love. Strength of mind and body involuntarily resisted the
ravages of this catastrophe. Will power seemed nothing, but the flesh
of her, that medium of exquisite sensation, so full of life, so prone to
joy, refused to surrender. The part of her that felt fought terribly for
its heritage.

All night long Carley lay there. The crescent moon went down, the stars
moved on their course, the coyotes ceased to wail, the wind died away,
the lapping of the waves along the lake shore wore to gentle splash, the
whispering of the insects stopped as the cold of dawn approached. The
darkest hour fell--hour of silence, solitude, and melancholy, when the
desert lay tranced, cold, waiting, mournful without light of moon or
stars or sun.

In the gray dawn Carley dragged her bruised and aching body back to her
tent, and, fastening the door, she threw off wet clothes and boots and
fell upon her bed. Slumber of exhaustion came to her.

When she awoke the tent was light and the moving shadows of cedar boughs
on the white canvas told that the sun was straight above. Carley ached
as never before. A deep pang seemed invested in every bone. Her heart
felt swollen out of proportion to its space in her breast. Her breathing
came slow and it hurt. Her blood was sluggish. Suddenly she shut her
eyes. She loathed the light of day. What was it that had happened?

Then the brutal truth flashed over her again, in aspect new, with
all the old bitterness. For an instant she experienced a suffocating
sensation as if the canvas had sagged under the burden of heavy air and
was crushing her breast and heart. Then wave after wave of emotion swept
over her. The storm winds of grief and passion were loosened again. And
she writhed in her misery.

Some one knocked on her door. The Mexican woman called anxiously. Carley
awoke to the fact that her presence was not solitary on the physical
earth, even if her soul seemed stricken to eternal loneliness. Even in
the desert there was a world to consider. Vanity that had bled to death,
pride that had been crushed, availed her not here. But something else
came to her support. The lesson of the West had been to endure, not to
shirk--to face an issue,