"Say it again."
Helen repeated the sentence.
"Oh! Why, it sounds like 'praising is not loving.' Where did you hear it?"
"Oh, I heard it. I wondered what it meant. You know I don't care for
German."
"Nor for the German?" Miss Gray ventured.
"Nor for the German," Helen said after a pause. And that was as near as she came to exchanging confidences with Miss Gray. But was there anything to give in exchange?
She asked the question several times on the way home. Her good-bye to
Bauer had been commonplace enough. He had ventured at the last moment
after the party was seated in the wagon ready for the drive to Canyon
Diablo to hand up a book to Helen.
"Would you accept this to use on your journey? You may find it help pass the time. It's the collection of desert flowers I've been making."
Helen was really pleased and expressed her thanks warmly. But nothing more was said except the regular good-byes as the Douglases waved their farewells to all the mission people on the little knoll.
When she was on the train and started for home Helen found on examination that Bauer's modest volume was in reality composed of a rare collection of desert plants, and in the back leaves of the book were several photographs of desert scenes, including a dozen of Oraibi and the snake dance itself. She found her own person in several of the pictures, and the farther she travelled from Tolchaco the more persistently her mind travelled back to that enchanted land of adventure and heroism and love of humanity. She sighed to think that her own life seemed so commonplace. And always there obtruded on her mind the thought of Bauer as he sat there by the river looking at her out of his great brown eyes and saying, "Loben ist nicht lieben." And always as the days flew by and she resumed her special work in music at home, the figure grew more heroic and dignified the longer she mused upon it, while over all shone the desert sun and the white translucent light, with the San Francisco mountains calmly lifting up their cool blackness against a turquoise sky.