el David's
presence. It was as though he stood beside him and saw all this awakening,
this responding of the desert to his project. Almost it compensated--for
those four days.

Almost! Tisdale drew his hand across his eyes and turned to follow the
drive between the rows of nodding narcissus. The irony of it! That
Weatherbee should have lived to find the Aurora; that, with many times the
needed capital in sight, he should have lost. The perfume of the flowers
filled the warm atmosphere; the music of running water was everywhere. As
he left the side of the flume, the silver note of the fountain came to him
from the patio, then, like a mirage between him and the low Spanish
building, rose that miniature house he had found in the Alaska wilderness,
with the small snow figure before it, holding a bundle in her arms.

The vision passed. But that image with the bundle was the one unfinished
problem in the project he had come to solve.

He entered the court and saw on his right an open door and, across the
wide room, Beatriz Weatherbee. She was seated at a quaint secretary on
which were several bundles of papers, and the familiar box that had
contained David's letters and watch. At the moment Tisdale discovered her,
she was absorbed in a photograph she held in her hands, but at the sound
of his step in the patio she turned and rose to meet him. Her face was
radiant, yet she looked at him through arrested tears.

"I am sorry if I startled you," he said conventionally. "Banks brought me
from the station, but he left me to walk up the bench."

"I should have seen the red car down the gap had I been at the window,"
she replied, "but I was busy putting away papers. Freight has been moving
slowly over the Great Northern, and my secretary arrived only to-day. It
bore the trip very well, considering its age. It belonged to my
great-grandfather, Don Silva Gonzales. He brought it from Spain, but
Elizabeth says it might have been made for this room. She is walking
somewhere in the direction of the spring."

While she spoke, she touched her cheeks and eyes swiftly with her
handkerchief and led the way to some chairs between the secretary and the
great window that overlooked the vale. Tisdale did not look at her
directly; he wished to give her time to cover the emotion he had
surprised.

"I should say the room was built for Don Silva's desk," he amended. "And--
do you know?--this view reminds me of a little picture of Granada, a
wat