The tears had burned out of the steadfast eyes which were resting, with the shining soul looking out through them, upon the crimsoning snow peaks of the distant Timanyonis.
"How little you know the real love!" she said slowly. "It neither weighs nor measures, nor needs to; it writes its own law in the heart, and that law can make no compromise with evil. It has but one requirement—the best good of the beloved. If the way to that end lies through sacrifice—if it asks for the life itself—so let it be. If you knew this, Victor, you would know that I would gladly lose all—the mine, my father's chance of his reward for the years of toil, even my brother's better chance for reformation—and count myself happy in having found a love that was too great to do evil that good might come."
He got up stiffly and helped her to her feet and together they stood looking down upon the city of the plain, lying now under the curved, sunset shadow cast by the mighty, inbending sweep of the great dam.
"I don't know," he said after a time. "Once, as I told you a few weeks ago, the best there was in me would have leaped up to climb the heights with you. But I've gone far since the going began. I am not sure that I could find my way back if I should try. Let's go down. I mustn't keep you out on the mountain after dark. I haven't happened to meet her, but I suppose there is a Mrs. Grundy, even in Gomorrah."
She acquiesced in silence and they made the descent of the steep trail and walked across in the growing dusk from the foot of Chigringo to the stuccoed villa in the suburb, misers of speech, since there were no deeper depths to which the spoken word could plunge. But at the villa steps Brouillard took the girl in his arms and kissed her.
"Put me out of your mind and heart if you can," he said tenderly, repeating the words which he had once sent across the distances to her in another moment of despair, and before she could answer he was gone.
Monsieur Poudrecaulx Bongras, rotund, smiling, and roached and waxed to a broad burlesque of Second-Empire fierceness, looked in vain among his dinner guests that evening for the chief of the Reclamation Service, and Brouillard's absence held a small disappointment for the Frenchman. Rumor, the rumor which was never quiet and which could never be traced conclusively to its source, was again busy with exciting hints of a new era of prosperity about to dawn, and Bongras had hoped to drop his own little plummet of inquiry into the Reclamation Service chief.
The chance did not materialize. The lights in a certain upper office in the Niquoia Building were still turned on long after M. Poudrecaulx had given up the hope of the deep-sea sounding for that night. Some time after the lobby crowd had melted, and before the lower avenue had begun to order small-hour suppers of Bongras, the two high windows in the Niquoia Building went dark and a few minutes later the man who had spent half the night tramping the floor or sitting with his head in his hands at the desk in the upper room came out of the street archway and walked briskly to the telegraph office across the plaza.
"How is the line to-night, Sanford—pretty clear?" he asked of the night manager, killing time while the sleepy night receiving clerk was making his third attempt to count the words in the closely written, two-page government cipher.