alone about myself," he said.

"I'd like to hear," she replied, timidly.

"Do I strike you as an unhappy man?"

"No, indeed."

"Well, how DO I strike you?"

This was an entirely new tack he had veered to.

"Very good and kind to us women," she said.

"I don't know about that. If I am so, it doesn't bring me happiness.
... Do you remember what I told you once, about my being a
preacher--disgrace, ruin, and all that--and my rainbow-chasing dream out
here after a--a lost girl?"

"I--remember all--you said," she replied, very low.

"Listen." His voice was a little husky, but behind it there seemed a
tide of resistless utterance. "Loss of faith and name did not send me to
this wilderness. But I had love--love for that lost girl, Fay Larkin. I
dreamed about her till I loved her. I dreamed that I would find her--my
treasure--at the foot of a rainbow. Dreams!... When you told me she was
dead I accepted that. There was truth in your voice. I respected your
reticence. But something died in me then. I lost myself, the best of me,
the good that might have uplifted me. I went away, down upon the barren
desert, and there I rode and slept and grew into another and a harder
man. Yet, strange to say, I never forgot her, though my dreams were
done. As I toiled and suffered and changed I loved her--if not her,
the thought of her--more and more. Now I have come back to these walled
valleys--to the smell of pinyon, to the flowers in the nooks, to the
wind on the heights, to the silence and loneliness and beauty. And here
the dreams come back and SHE is WITH me always. Her spirit is all that
keeps me kind and good, as you say I am. But I suffer, I long for her
alive. If I love her dead, how could I love her living! Always I torture
myself with the vain dream that--that she MIGHT not be dead. I have
never been anything but a dreamer. And here I go about my work by day
and lie awake at night with that lost girl in my mind.... I love her.
Does that seem strange to you? But it would not if you understood.
Think. I had lost faith, hope. I set myself a great work--to find Fay
Larkin. And by the fire and the iron and the blood that I felt it
would cost to save her some faith must come to me again.... My work
is undone--I've never saved her. But listen, how strange it is to
feel--now--as I let myself go--that just the loving her and the living
here in the wildness that holds her somewhere have brought me hope
again. Some faith must come,