ght of beauty passed away.
In that darkening desert there was something illimitable. Madeline saw
the hollow of a stupendous hand; she felt a mighty hold upon her heart.
Out of the endless space, out of silence and desolation and mystery and
age, came slow-changing colored shadows, phantoms of peace, and they
whispered to Madeline. They whispered that it was a great, grim,
immutable earth; that time was eternity; that life was fleeting. They
whispered for her to be a woman; to love some one before it was too
late; to love any one, every one; to realize the need of work, and in
doing it to find happiness.

She rode back across the mesa and down the trail, and, once more upon
the flat, she called to the horse and made him run. His spirit seemed to
race with hers. The wind of his speed blew her hair from its fastenings.
When he thundered to a halt at the porch steps Madeline, breathless and
disheveled, alighted with the mass of her hair tumbling around her.

Alfred met her, and his exclamation, and Florence's rapt eyes shining
on her face, and Stillwell's speechlessness made her self-conscious.
Laughing, she tried to put up the mass of hair.

"I must--look a--fright," she panted.

"Wal, you can say what you like," replied the old cattleman, "but I know
what I think."

Madeline strove to attain calmness.

"My hat--and my combs--went on the wind. I thought my hair would go,
too.... There is the evening star.... I think I am very hungry."

And then she gave up trying to be calm, and likewise to fasten up her
hair, which fell again in a golden mass.

"Mr. Stillwell," she began, and paused, strangely aware of a hurried
note, a deeper ring in her voice. "Mr. Stillwell, I want to buy your
ranch--to engage you as my superintendent. I want to buy Don Carlos's
ranch and other property to the extent, say, of fifty thousand acres.
I want you to buy horses and cattle--in short, to make all those
improvements which you said you had so long dreamed of. Then I have
ideas of my own, in the development of which I must have your advice and
Alfred's. I intend to better the condition of those poor Mexicans in the
valley. I intend to make life a little more worth living for them and
for the cowboys of this range. To-morrow we shall talk it all over, plan
all the business details."

Madeline turned from the huge, ever-widening smile that beamed down upon
her and held out her hands to her brother.

"Alfred, strange, is it not, my comi