ds which she was to visit on the morrow,
the Sphinx in its majesty between. It was fairyland, in truth, the most
gorgeous riot of color and mystery in the whole world, and yet she saw
it not. The languorous air was heavy almost to oppression with the
blended odor of jasmine, orange, citron, and the thousand and one
flowers of the myriad gardens, mingled with the reek of the bazaars and
the indescribable breath of the Nile. And yet she was all unconscious of
it.

For in the nostrils of her introspection there was only the spicy tang
of lemonias and sagebrush, and the eyes of her soul saw only a little
glade embowered with artemesia and clematis, nestled deep in the
forbidding cleft in the Rocky Mountains, many thousand miles away. A
glade where lay a dead man with the snarl of baffled hatred petrified on
his discolored lips, and another wounded almost to death, his head
clasped close to the bosom of a woman whom she should be logically
hating as woman was never hated before.

And yet in the heart of her there was only pity for the woman, whose
letter lay in her lap. For the hundredth time she read the tear-stained
words, feeling a new accession of tenderness at each transcribed sob:

"Yesterday, at the 'horse-shoe bend' in Lost Canyon, I killed the
man called Jasper Matlock, after he had shot Kenneth Douglass from
ambush. Mr. Douglass was not injured seriously, but at the time I
thought him dead. Somehow I found his revolver in my hands and the
man was making a second attempt.

"Mr. Ballard--ah, the great hearts of these
westerners--magnanimously sought to shield me from the consequences
and publicity. As though all the publicity in the world mattered
now.

"I have wronged you, but in one thing only: the lie about your
engagement to Ellerslie. That was my doing. In everything else I
had the justification of every law of Nature; I loved him far
better than you could ever do, and he was logically mine if I could
but win him. I was ready and eager to sacrifice all, while you in
your pitiful selfishness and egotism turned from the glory laid at
your feet and yielded him nothing. Oh, you fool! You poor, weak
fool! To deny him even the small assurance of your vain little
body, when you should have found, as I did, ecstatic exaltation in
letting him trample on my soul.

"Oh! child, in your wealth of possession be generous