"You think I, too, have attained?" he smiled. "I am not so sure of that. Sometimes I think I am like my father, who is like Mahomet's coffin; hanging somewhere between Heaven and earth, unable to climb to one or to fall to the other. But I'm not as brash as I was a year or so ago; at least, I'm not so cock-sure that I know it all. That evening in the music-room at Deer Trace changed me—changed my point of view. You haven't heard me rail once at the world, or at the hypocrites in it, since I came home, have you?"
"No."
"Well, I don't feel like railing. I reckon the old world is good enough to live in—to work in; and certainly there are men in it who are better than I'm ever likely to be. I met one of them last winter out in the Carriso cow country; a 'Protestant' priest, he called himself, of your persuasion. He was the most hopeless bigot I've ever known, and by long odds the nearest masculine approach to true, gritty saintliness. There was nothing he wouldn't do, no hardship he wouldn't cheerfully undergo, to brother a man who was down, and the wickedest devil in all that God-forsaken country swore by him. Yet he would argue with me by the hour, splitting hairs over Apostolic Succession, or something of that sort."
She smiled in her turn. "Did he regard you as a heretic?" she asked.
"Oh, sure! though he admitted that I might escape at the last by virtue of my 'invincible ignorance.' Then I would laugh at him, telling him he was a lot better than his bigotry. But he got the best of me in other ways. I owned the one buckboard in the northern half of Apache County, and my broncos were harness-broken and fast. So, when there was a shoot-up at the Arroyo dance-hall, or any other job of swift brothering to be done, I had to drive Father Philip."
She was musing again. "You used to write me that you were on the edge of things out there: it was a mistake, Tom; you were in the very heart of them."
He shook his head.
"No; the heart of them was back yonder in the music-room. There were chaos and thick darkness to go before that day of days; and it was your woman's love that changed the world for me."
"No," she denied; "that was only an incident. When chaos and darkness fled away, it was God who said, 'Let there be light.' The dawn had come for you before our day of days, Tom."
He stretched himself luxuriously on the sward at her feet.