THE SECRET POWER


BY MARIE CORELLI

AUTHOR OF

"God's Good Man" "The Master Christian" "Innocent,"
"The Treasure of Heaven," etc.







THE SECRET POWER

CHAPTER I


A cloud floated slowly above the mountain peak. Vast, fleecy and
white as the crested foam of a sea-wave, it sailed through the sky
with a divine air of majesty, seeming almost to express a
consciousness of its own grandeur. Over a spacious tract of Southern
California it extended its snowy canopy, moving from the distant
Pacific Ocean across the heights of the Sierra Madre, now and then
catching fire at its extreme edge from the sinking sun, which burned
like a red brand flung on the roof of a roughly built hut situated
on the side of a sloping hollow in one of the smaller hills. The