His heart leaped. His eyes raised and met the freckles. He clenched his hand. “If it wasn’t for them freckles--” “Yes?” “I could see your face.” Crimson went up her throat with delicate tints, blending the clear white of the breast with the brown of the round neck. He jumped to his feet: he pointed a commanding arm. “That hair!” “I know it’s--” “I don’t care what you know. Untie that knot!” She obeyed. A red gold flood rippled suddenly almost to her knees. Carrigan blinked. “Sit down!” She dropped to a chair, and Carrigan commenced to work. When a man has to do anything from roping a steer to jerking out a six-gun with the speed of light, he acquires a marvelous dexterity with his hands. Carrigan could almost think with his fingers. They seemed, in fact, to have a separate intelligence. He gathered up the silken mass. The soft touch thrilled him as if every one of the delicate threads carried a tiny charge of electricity. It was marvelous that such a shining torrent could have been reduced the moment before to that compacted, bright red knot. Carrigan closed his eyes and summoned up a vision of hair as he had seen it dressed, not on the heads of any of the mountain-desert belles, but in magazine pictures. With that vision before him he commenced to work, rapidly, surely. It seemed as if the hair, glad to escape from the bondage of that hard knot, fell of its own accord into graceful, waving lines. It curved low across the broad forehead: it gathered at the nape of the neck in a soft knot in the Grecian mode. “Now!” said Carrigan. She rose and faced him. “What’s happened?” she cried, for his lower jaw had fallen. He swallowed twice before he could answer. “I’m beginning to see your face!” For the face, after all, is like any picture. The hair is the frame, and an ugly frame will spoil the most lovely painting. The eye does not stop at a boundary. It includes it. “Once more!” said Carrigan, and seized the vanishing cream. As he worked now he felt like the artist who draws the human face from the block of marble. He felt as Michelangelo when the grim old Florentine said: “I do not create; I take off the outer layers of the stone and free the form which is hidden within.” Or perhaps he was more like Pygmalion and the inevitable statue when the artist saw the first hues of life faintly flushing in the cold marble. When he stepped back and looked at her, she seemed strangely aloof. She had drawn away a thousand miles and a thousand years. He discovered the most ancient of truths, that a beautiful woman is a world in herself upon which all men must look from the outside. She escapes from experience. It cannot stain her. She escapes from herself. Her beauty is greater than her soul. “It’s done,” said Carrigan sadly. “Isn’t it any use?” she queried. He thought of Maurie and hated the handsome face which rose in his memory.