of appreciation of her art.

"And what will you do with it?" he asked.

"I will send it to my bank when I can get any letters through, and then
when this snowball is big enough I will invest it."

"In mines?" still idly interested and smiling.

She shook her head. "I leave that to my father, he is a good judge and
he is lucky at it, and my mother is always buying patches of land and
trading them off, usually to good advantage. But my specialty is unset
stones. I have some very good ones, really, I have. Oh," with a little
glance over her shoulder toward her father and José, "I will show them
to you some day when José is not around. If he knew I had them he would
steal them just for the pleasure of keeping himself in practice."

"How you love beauty," he said.

"But they are valuable," she said. "Oh, yes, I love them, too. I love to
let them fall through my fingers, to pour them from one hand to another.
Sometimes, when I am all alone here in the cabin, I sit and I open my
little black leather bag and take them out and hold them in the palm of
my hand, and I turn them this way and that way just to catch the light,
and there is nothing so beautiful; in all the world there is nothing so
beautiful as jewels, except," she caught herself quickly, "the desert,
of course."

He sighed a little and stirred restlessly, the very mention of the
desert made him vaguely uneasy. He had listened to the call of the