"And what will you do with it?" he asked.
"I will send it to my bank when I can get any letters through, and then when this snowball is big enough I will invest it."
"In mines?" still idly interested and smiling.
She shook her head. "I leave that to my father, he is a good judge and he is lucky at it, and my mother is always buying patches of land and trading them off, usually to good advantage. But my specialty is unset stones. I have some very good ones, really, I have. Oh," with a little glance over her shoulder toward her father and José, "I will show them to you some day when José is not around. If he knew I had them he would steal them just for the pleasure of keeping himself in practice."
"How you love beauty," he said.
"But they are valuable," she said. "Oh, yes, I love them, too. I love to let them fall through my fingers, to pour them from one hand to another. Sometimes, when I am all alone here in the cabin, I sit and I open my little black leather bag and take them out and hold them in the palm of my hand, and I turn them this way and that way just to catch the light, and there is nothing so beautiful; in all the world there is nothing so beautiful as jewels, except," she caught herself quickly, "the desert, of course."
He sighed a little and stirred restlessly, the very mention of the desert made him vaguely uneasy. He had listened to the call of the mountains and obeyed it, and from that moment the desert, like the world, had no place in his thoughts; but since the night that Pearl had danced it had remained in his mind, and had become to him as a far horizon. The desert has ever been a factor in the consciousness of man, not to be excluded, and although Seagreave did not realize it, the moment had come in which he must reckon with it. He felt the fascination and repulsion of its impenetrable mystery, of its stark and desolate wastes, whose spell is yet so potent in the imagination of man, that many have found in its barren horror the very heart of beauty. He wondered if the uncontaminated winds which blew from out the ages across the vast, empty spaces murmured a message of greater import than that whispered to him among the mountain tops, if the wings of light which beat unceasingly above its shifting sands lifted the soul to some undreamed of realm of eternal morning. Something that slept deep within him stirred faintly; the old passion to adventure, to explore rose in his heart, his restless, reckless heart, which had, so he believed, found peace.
The shadow deepened in his eyes, but he suddenly roused from this momentary abstraction to find that Pearl was still speaking.
"Yes, I love them because they are so beautiful, but I love them, too, because they are valuable."
"Well, there is no question about your making all the money you wish," he said, a slight weariness in his tone, "thousands and thousands. The world will fling it at you. It will cover you with jewels."