refully re-reading and making several minor corrections, Linda
picked up her pencil, and across the top of a sheet of heavy paper
sketched the peaks of a chain of mountains. Across the base she drew
a stretch of desert floor, bristling with the thorns of many different
cacti brilliant with their gold, pink, and red bloom, intermingled with
fine grasses and desert flower faces.

At the left she painstakingly drew a huge plant of yucca with a perfect
circle of bayonets, from the center of which uprose the gigantic flower
stem the length of her page, and on the misty bloom of the flaming
tongue she worked quite as late as Marian Thorne had ever seen a light
burning in her window. When she had finished her drawing she studied it
carefully a long time, adding a touch here and there, and then she said
softly: "There, Daddy, I feel that even you would think that a faithful
reproduction Tomorrow night I'll paint it."

John Gilman saw the light from Linda's window when he brought Eileen
home that night, and when he left he glanced that way again, and was
surprised to see the room still lighted, and the young figure bending
over a worktable. He stood very still for a few minutes, wondering what
could keep Linda awake so far into the night, and while his thoughts
were upon her he wondered, too, why she did not care to have beautiful
clothes such as Eileen wore; and then he went further and wondered why,
when she could be as entertaining as she had been the night she joined
them at dinner, she did not make her appearance oftener; and then,
because the mind is a queer thing, and he had wondered about a given
state of affairs, he went a step further, and wondered whether the
explanation lay in Linda's inclinations or in Eileen's management,
and then his thought fastened tenaciously upon the subject of Eileen's
management.

He was a patient man. He had allowed his reason and better judgment to
be swayed by Eileen's exquisite beauty and her blandishments. He did not
regret having discovered before it was too late that Marian Thorne
was not the girl he had thought her. He wanted a wife cut after the
clinging-vine pattern. He wanted to be the dominating figure in
his home. It had not taken Eileen long to teach him that Marian was
self-assertive and would do a large share of dominating herself. He had
thought that he was perfectly satisfied and very happy with Eileen; yet
that day he repeatedly had felt piqued and annoyed with her. She