way.

"There is then only one thing to do?"

"On the contrary,"--Mrs. MacGregor spoke sharply, for she was losing
patience,--"there are three courses open to you. You can go on as you
are going and the end is ruin. Ruin to Helen, ruin to Amy, ruin to your
work, ruin to yourself. You can break off your relations with Helen
Lonsdale and go back to your old life; your life as it was before Helen
entered it. Or--" She paused, as one who could go farther, but would
not.

"What?" Elijah breathed the word rather than spoke it.

Mrs. MacGregor answered as one wearied with a hopeless burden.

"The laws of the world recognize the fact that the purest impulses of
man are often mistaken. They recognize this fact and have provided a way
of separation."

Elijah made no reply. They drove on in silence toward his ranch where
Mrs. MacGregor was to spend a few days. His thought wandered from his
surroundings back to the clear sunlight, the bracing air of his old New
England home. There was peace there; the peace of simple lives untouched
by the fierce passions of the throbbing world. He saw Amy Eltharp,
flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, walking through the cool woods, her hand in
his own, her eyes down-cast, her cheeks delicately flushed, as her
trembling lips breathed "yes" in answer to his passionate words.

Now it was all gone. He was in a desert land, burned with conflicting
emotions as fierce as the sun that beat upon the sands around him.

When they reached the ranch, Amy was standing in the rose-trellised
drive-way to welcome them. Fair as the roses that surrounded her, she
stood with anxious eyes raised to Elijah. Her purpose to make herself
useful to Elijah, was yet strong within her. Perhaps this fact tempered
for her the chill of Elijah's absent-minded response to her greeting.
She was feeding her heart on hope. "A little study, a little practice
and the thing is done."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Amy Berl was demonstrating the world-old truth, that love, however
selfish, ennobles and softens the life into which it enters. With feeble
brain but loving heart, she was working out for herself the truth that
love which feeds on sensuous beauty or sensuous passion alone, dies the
death of the brute; that the love which is born not to die, must drink
deeper and ever deeper with the passing years at the fountain of eternal
youth; that to a love thus thirst-quenched, every gray hair that marks a
day forever gone, every wrinkle on fl