He shook his head. "It's the pull of the desert," he murmured. "It's caught you sooner than most. You're more responsive, I suppose; more sens--Why, Butterfly! You're shaking."

"A Scotchman would say that I was 'fey.' Ban, do you think it means that I'm coming back here to die?" She laughed again. "If I were fated to die here, I expect that I missed my good chance in the smash-up. Fortunately I'm not superstitious."

"There might be worse places," said he slowly. "It is the place that would call me back if ever I got down and out." He pointed through the window to the distant, glowing purity of the mountain peak. "One could tell one's troubles to that tranquil old god."

"Would he listen to mine, I wonder?"

"Try him before you go. You can leave them all here and I'll watch over them for you to see that they don't get loose and bother you."

"Absolution! If it were only as easy as that! This _is_ a haunted place.... Why should I be here at all? _Why_ didn't I go when I should?

Why a thousand things?"

"Chance."

"Is there any such thing? Why can't I sleep at night yet, as I ought?

Why do I still feel hunted? What's happening to me, Ban? What's getting ready to happen?"

"Nothing. That's nerves."

"Yes; I'll try not to think of it. But at night--Ban, suppose I should come over in the middle of the night when I can't sleep, and call outside your window?"

"I'd come down, of course. But you'd have to be careful about rattlers,"

answered the practical Ban.

"Your friend, Camilla, would intercept me, anyway. I don't think she sleeps too well, herself. Do you know what she's doing out here?"

"She came for her health."

"That isn't what I asked you, my dear. Do you know what she's doing?"

"No. She never told me."

"Shall I tell you?"

"No."

"It's interesting. Aren't you curious?"

"If she wanted me to know, she'd tell me."

"Indubitably correct, and quite praiseworthy," mocked the girl. "Never mind; you know how to be staunch to your friends."

"In this country a man who doesn't is reckoned a yellow dog."

"He is in any decent country. So take that with you when you go."

"I'm not going," he asserted with an obstinate set to his jaw.

"Wait and see," she taunted. "So you won't let me send you books?" she questioned after a pause.

"No."

"No, I thank you," she prompted.

"No, I thank you," he amended. "I'm an uncouth sort of person, but I meant the 'thank you.'"

"Of course you did. And uncouthness is the last thing in the world you could be accused of. That's the wonder of it.... No; I don't suppose it really is. It's birth."

"If it's anything, it's training. My father was a stickler for forms, in spite of being a sort of hobo."

"Well, forms make the game, very largely. You won't find them essentially different when you go out into the--I forgot again. That kind of prophecy annoys you, doesn't it? There is one book I'm going to send you, though, which you can't refuse. Nobody can refuse it. It isn't done."

"What is that?"

Her answer surprised him. "The Bible."

"Are you religious? Of course, a butterfly should be, shouldn't she?

should believe in the release of the soul from its chrysalis--the butterfly's immortality. Yet I wouldn't have suspected you of a leaning in that direction."

"Oh, religion!" Her tone set aside the subject as insusceptible of sufficient or satisfactory answer. "I go through the forms," she added, a little disdainfully. "As to what I believe and do--which is what one's own religion is--why, I assume that if the game is worth playing at all, there must be a Judge and Maker of the Rules. As far as I understand them, I follow them."

"You have a sort of religious feeling for success, though, haven't you?"

he reminded her slyly.

"Not at all. Just human, common sense."

"But your creed as you've just given it, the rules of the game and that; that's precisely the Bible formula, I believe."

"How do you know?" she caught him up. "You haven't a Bible in the place, so far as I've noticed."

"No; I haven't."

"You should have."

"Probably. But I can't, somehow, adjust myself to that advice as coming from you."

"Because you don't understand what I'm getting at. It isn't religious advice."

"Then what is it?"

"Literary, purely. You're going to write, some day. Oh, don't look doubtful! That's foreordained. It doesn't take a seeress to prophesy that. And the Bible is the one book that a writer ought to read every day. Isaiah, Psalms, Proverbs. Pretty much all the Old Testament, and a lot of the New. It has grown into our intellectual life until its phrases and catchwords are full of overtones and sub-meanings. You've got to have it in your business; your coming business, I mean. I know what I'm talking about, Mr. Errol Banneker--_moi qui parle_. They offered me an instructorship in Literature when I graduated. I even threatened to take it, just for a joke on Dad. _Now_, will you be good and accept my fully explained and diagrammed Bible without fearing that I have designs on your soul?"

"Yes."

"And will you please go back to your work at once, and by and by take me home and stay to supper? Miss Van Arsdale told me to ask you."

"All right. I'll be glad to. What will you do between now and four o'clock?"