er beautiful. But with
his sensitive observation he had seen through the shell to the
sweetness underneath; for surely Joan was sweet, a Friday's child. It
was good that Jasper had torn the skin from her wound, good that he
had broken up the hardness of her heart. She left him and Yarnall that
afternoon and went away to her cabin in the trees and lay face down on
the bare boards of the floor and was young again. Waves of longing for
love and beauty and adventure flooded her. For a while she had been
very beautiful and had been very passionately loved; for a while she
had been surrounded by beauty and taught its meanings. She had fled
from it all. She hated it, yes, but she longed for it with every fiber
of her being. The last two years were scalded away. She was Joan, who
had loved Pierre; Joan, whom Prosper Gael had loved.

Toward morning, dawn feeling with white fingers through the pine
boughs into her uncurtained window, Joan stopped her weeping and stood
up. She was very tired and felt as though all the hardness and
strength had been beaten from her heart. She opened her door and
looked at pale stars and a still, slowly brightening world. In a
hollow below the pines a stream ran and poured its hoarse, hurrying
voice into the silence. Joan bent under the branches, undressed and
bathed. The icy water shocked life back into her spirit. She began to
tingle and to glow. In spite of herself she felt happier. She had been
stony for so long, neither sorrowful nor glad; now, after the night of
sharp pain, she was aware of the gladness of morning. She came up from
her plunge, glowing and beautiful, with loose, wet hair.

In the corral the men were watering their teams; above them on the
edge of a mesa, against the rosy sky, the other ponies, out all night
on the range, were trooping, driven by a cowboy who darted here and
there on his nimble pony, giving shrill cries. In the clear air every
syllable was sharp to the ear, every tint and line sharp to the eye.
It was beautiful, very beautiful, and it was near and dear to her,
native to her--this loveliness of quick action, of inarticulate
calling to dumb beasts, of work, of simple, often repeated beginnings.
She was glad that she was working with her hands. She twisted up her
hair and went over to the ranch-house where she began soberly and
thankfully to light her kitchen fire.

It was after breakfast, two or three mornings later, when a stranger
on a chestnut pony rode into