"Gee! You bet it was a climb," he said, wiping his brow and still
breathing a little hard. "But I'd have climbed right on up to heaven if
you'd been there waiting for me. Lord, Pearl! if I'd had to wait much
longer to see you it would have finished me, I do believe. Oh,
sweetheart, you're lovelier than ever, and you're not going to punish
either of us any more, I can tell you that. You're coming down with me
and we're going to live, Pearl, live, just as I told you we would, down
there in the palms in the desert. Now I'm telling you again among the
pines, and this time you're going to listen and come. I guess we've both
of us pretty well found out that it's no use our trying to live apart
any longer."

Her crimson cloak had fallen from her shoulders, and Hanson, holding her
hand in his, had pushed up her sleeve and was kissing her arm, as he
talked, up as far as her elbow and down again to the tips of her
fingers. She did not even attempt to draw her hand away, she was still
in that state of apathy, where all her senses seemed dulled; and so she
let him babble on, murmuring his adoration and his rose-colored dreams
of the future.

"By George!" he exclaimed, in sheer, sincere amazement. "To think of
you, the Black Pearl, spending all these months up here in these dead
old mountains without even a moving-picture show to look at. You got an
awful will, girl."

She gazed with somber eyes beyond him. Life, did he say "life"? That was
what she asked, what she demanded, life as glorious and as rich in color
as a full-blown rose. And only a little while ago she had dreamed that
she could find it with him, that _that_ was what he offered to her. She