"When the storm came it broke swift and sudden like the sand storm, and we didn't live it all over beforehand, getting ready for it, and deciding how we'd meet it when it came, and all that. We just enjoyed ourselves. Lived and loved up to the moment when it broke, and that was the best way."

"Gee! was there ever a woman like you!" lifting his glad, gay gaze to the sky. "Why, Pearl, it most frightens me when I think how happy me and you are going to be together."

"Are we?" nestling closer to him. "How?"

"How?" he repeated. "Why, we're going to be together first and last; ain't that enough? It is for me. But"--with drooping head and affectedly humble and dejected mien--"it couldn't be expected to be enough for you, could it?"

"Hardly," she looked up at him through her long lashes.

"Well, since that ain't enough for you," still with affected resignation, "let me tell you this: You're going to dance to bigger crowds and higher cla.s.s ones than you ever saw before, because you're going to be advertised proper, see?" And then, sketching out plans with his former bold, optimistic confidence, "We're going to travel on the other side and travel in style, too, a big touring automobile. I guess you can show those foreign managers something new in the dancing line.

How would you like to see your name all over London and Paris? The Black Pearl! Eh?"

She slipped away from him and took a few buoyant dancing steps. "Fine!"

she laughed. "It sure sounds good to me." Floating nearer to him, she pinched his arm. "Ain't you the spellbinder!"

He caught her with one arm. "Oh, Pearl," his voice falling to seriousness, "you don't know how happy you make me. Honest, I've been so plum scared these last few days, I been almost crazy. I didn't know, you see, just how much influence your Pop and Flick might have over you, and I got locoed for fear you wouldn't see me and give me a chance to explain."

"Pop and Bob Flick kindly took the bother of explaining things off your shoulders, didn't they?" with a short, vindictive laugh.

"Darn 'em," bitterly. "I don't want to say anything about your Pop, but Flick's a sneaking coyote, and sooner or later he'll pay for snooping into my business. Oh, I've cursed myself more than once for letting him tell you, but I never loved a woman before, Pearl, and I couldn't take the chances, honest I couldn't. I hadn't the nerve." There was a pa.s.sionate sincerity in his voice.

"They've been telling me you've loved many a woman." Her eyes gloomed and she slashed her skirt savagely with the riding crop she held.

"You know," he whispered, "you know. I've been a fool. There have been many others, Pearl, I ain't going to deceive you, but--there's never been but one."

She softened and smiled at him, then her face darkened again. "But there's one that stands in the way--yet," she said gloomily.

"In the way? What do you mean?" uncomprehendingly.

"Why, that woman up in Colina? Don't she stand between you and me, now, for a while?"

"Not much, she don't," emphatically, "not her!"

A light flared in Pearl's eyes. "I knew Pop and Bob were up to some of their tricks! They been doing their best to ram it home that she'll die before she lets you get a divorce."

"You bet she will," muttered Hanson, with concentrated bitterness, and stifled some maledictions under his breath. "I've tried every way, turned every trick known to sharp lawyers for the last six years, trying to get free; but she's got money, you see, and she can keep her eye on me, so, in one way or another, she's balked me every time."

Pearl threw herself from him and looked at him with wild eyes. "Then how are you going to get free now?" she cried. "What are your plans? Why is she going to come around now, if she never has before?"

"She ain't, honey, the devil take her!" He caught her back in his arms and held her as if he would never release her. "But what difference does that make to us?" he pleaded ardently. "We're going to let the whole lot of them go hang and live our lives as we choose."

"Then Pop and Bob were right; and I never believed them, not for a moment. I thought you were too smart to stay caught in a trap like that.

I thought you were so quick and keen to plan and were so full of ideas that you could get around any situation." Again she flung herself away from him and, with her face turned from him, stood looking out over the desert.

He bent toward her and, throwing his arms about her, again endeavored to draw her back into his embrace, but she resisted.

"Pearl," he cried roughly, "what do you mean? You don't mean to say that you got any foolish ideas about it making any difference whether a preacher says a few words over us or not? Why, you can't feel that way.

You've seen too much of life, and your folks have always been show people. They didn't hold any such ideas. Anyway, you got brains to think for yourself. What joke you playing on me, honey? Oh, don't hold me off like that, lift your head and look at me. I know you're going to laugh in about a minute and then I'll know it's all a joke." Again he tried to put his arm about her and again she threw him off.

"Let me alone," she cried harshly. "I'm thinking. Let me alone."

"Pearl," he besought wildly; his face had suddenly grown flabby and white, his voice was broken with his desperate pleading. "Honey, you don't want time to think. Why, there's nothing to think about. We're going off on the train this afternoon to be happy together, and we don't give a cent for anything else. We'd be married if we could. My Lord! I should say so! But since we can't, we'll make the best of it."

He paused and looked at her, but there was something inflexible in her att.i.tude, some almost threatening aloofness that made him hesitate to clasp her as he longed to do for fear he should meet another and final rebuff. He waited a moment or two, but, as she did not speak, he began again.

"I know you're joking, Pearl, but it's awful hard on me"--he wiped the sweat from his brow. "You haven't got any such fool ideas. Of course you haven't. They're for dead ones, old maid country school teachers, and preachers and things like that, hypocrites that have got to make their living by playing the respectable game. But we're not that kind, Pearl, we're alive, and we're not afraid. We're going to be happier than two people ever were in this world. Pearl, speak to me. I don't wonder that your mother complains about the way you shut yourself up and never say a word. Speak to me. Tell me what you're thinking."

"I'm thinking a lot of things," she answered, but without turning her head to look at him, "and I ain't through yet. Now I've got to studying on this matter, I'm a-going to think it out here and now."

"But what is there to think about?" in a sort of exasperated despair.

"Oh, Pearl, how can you be so cruel! I know you ain't got any of the fool ideas of the dead ones I was talking about. You couldn't have; not with Isobel Montmorenci for a grandmother, and Queenie Madrew for a mother, and the same kind on your Pop's side of the house. You didn't have any Sunday-school bringing up and I know it. Then what you playing with me like a cat does with a mouse for? It ain't fair, Pearl, it ain't fair."

She turned and faced him now with an impatient gesture of the hands.

Some expression on her face, the set of her mouth, the horse-shoe frown on her forehead gave her a fleeting resemblance to her father, a resemblance that momentarily chilled his blood.

"For goodness' sake keep quiet a minute," she cried irritably. "You gave me a jolt a while ago, telling me you couldn't get free, and I want a minute or two to take it in."

"But you don't think hard of me for that," he implored. "Oh, Pearl--"

but she had again turned to her contemplation of the desert, and realizing that further speech might bring her swift anger upon him he walked hastily away.

Several yards from her he paused and again wiped his brow. "Oh, G.o.d!" he muttered, lifting his face to the sky, "what does a man know about women, anyway?"

As for Pearl, she scarcely knew that he had ceased to speak to her. She had been thinking, as she averred, thinking back over the years. She had been dancing professionally ever since she had been a child. As a slim, tall, young girl, still in skirts to her shoe tops, her mother had traveled with her, and, although this evidence of chaperonage irked her, she had with her quick intelligence early seen its value. All about her she saw the struggling flotsam of feminine youth, living easily, luxuriously to-day, careless of any less prosperous morrows, and, when those swift, inevitable morrows came, she had seen the girlish, exotic queens of an hour, haggard, stripped of their transient splendor, uncomprehending, almost helpless.

She saw readily enough that it was not only her superior talents and training, the hard work and hard study which she gave to her profession which set her above the b.u.t.terflies and apart from them, but her mother's constant presence during those early years was of almost equal value.

All this she realized at an age when strong impressions are indelibly retained. Her value, the tremendous value of an unsmirched virtue, a woman's greatest a.s.set in a world of desire and barter, became to her a possession she cherished above her jewels, above the money she could earn and save and the greater sums she dreamed of earning or winning by any means--all means but one.

Her observations of the women about her who gave all for so little, her meditations upon them, and the conclusions she drew from their maimed lives only emphasized the resisting force of her nature. She was not born to be a leaf in the current, whirled by the force of waters into a safe haven or an engulfing whirlpool as chance might decide; she must dominate the currents.

And with the temptations of her youth, and her ardent emotional temperament, would also come the remembrance of those haggard girls with their pinched blue lips, the suffering in their eyes, their delicate faces aged and yellowed and lined and spoiled, weeping with shaking sobs, telling her pitiful stories, and begging her for money, for a word with the management. And, when they had gone, she had turned to her looking-gla.s.s and gazed at herself with conscious pride and delight.

Contempt, not pity, stirred her heart for the draggled b.u.t.terflies whose gauzy irridescence was but for a moment; and before her mirror she constantly renewed her vows that never would she barter her bloom, her freshness, her exquisite grace for what those girls had to show.

She had seen a great French actress roll across the desert in her private car, to meet in every city the adulation of thousands and it had stimulated her ambition enormously. She was by nature as insatiable as the horse-leech's daughter; she would take all--love, money, jewels in return for her barren coquetries. The fact that she was "straight," as she phrased it, gave her sufficient excuse for her arrogant domination.

Unfortunately for Hanson, there was no particular temptation in what he could offer in the way of professional advancement. She was perfectly cognizant of her own ability, aware that its resources were scarcely developed. Already her field widened continually. She was in perpetual demand with her public, and therefore with her managers.

But she loved Hanson. In all of the love affairs in which she had been involved she had never really cared before, and now only her strong will kept this attraction from proving overmastering. And here came the struggle. The right or the wrong of the matter, the morals of it, did not touch her. It was the clash of differing desires, a clash between pa.s.sion and this secret, long-cherished pride of virtue.

"Honey, honey," he was back at her side again; his voice was hoa.r.s.e and ragged, but for that very reason it moved her. All at once the primitive woman, loving, yielding, glad and proud to yield, stirred in her, rose and dominated her hard ambition. She lifted her head a little and, still with it turned from him, looked at the pagan glory of the day. Her eyes closed with the delight of that moment. She felt her resistance breaking down, the weakening and softening of her resolutions. Was she at last to know the splendor of loving and giving?

"Ain't you played with me long enough, Pearl?" his voice was in her ear, a broken, husky whisper. "What's the use? Why, of course," grasping at his usual self-confidence, "I'm a fool to get scared this way. You've showed me that you care, you have, honey; and I guess," with a nervous laugh, "the Black Pearl hasn't got any d.a.m.n fool scruples such as I've been frightening myself out of my skin by attributing to her."

Imperceptibly, almost, her whole body stiffened. Her soft, relaxed, yielding att.i.tude was gone. But she remained silent, the same ominous, brooding silence that the desert had held before the storm, had Hanson but noticed. He did not. He was still pleading: "Why all the time you been keeping me on the anxious seat, I been telling myself that the Black Pearl--"

"Yes, the Black Pearl," she interrupted him with her low, unpleasant laugh. "Don't you care a little that I got that name, Rudolf?"

"Care!" He wound his arms about her now and buried his face in the great waves of her inky, shining hair, wildly kissing the nape of her neck; but with a deft twist of her lithe body she slipped almost away from him, although his arms still held her. "Care? Of course I care. But what's that got to do with it when I love you like I do? Pearl, if you were a good deal blacker than you're painted it wouldn't make any difference to me."