Past all misguiding of our youth, past all time and distance and unlikelihood, the god who would be worshipped most by the welding of spirit into spirit, had brought us two together only to be rived apart by the necessity which tied us each, not only to our own, but to other people's means of making a living. The two or three hours following on Helmeth's announcement of the accident which had, who knows but at the instance of the Powers which was bent upon uniting us, shattered the point of his attachment to the Mexican scheme, we spent in that drowning realization of the source of being and delight for each in the other, which is the process and the end of loving. And then the withdrawing of whole electric constellations from the city skyline and the clatter of the morning traffic in the street, and the dispersing blueness, let in with them the considerations which whipped us apart. If there is a god of business he is of a superior subtlety, for even then we proposed to one another that the best way of being quit of the obligation was to serve our time to it; and it was in pursuance of some such idea that I found myself, toward the latter part of June, going out to Los Angeles to meet Mr. Garrett who would by that time, have come up the coast from Mazatplan to make purchases of supplies. I should have gone much farther than that merely to have touch with him, the warm pressure of his hand, his voice at my ear; all my dreams even, were tinged by the loss out of my life of his bodily presence. It was a singular flame-touched circumstance that the assured success of my new venture set up in me a fiercer need. There had not been time for much in his letters but accounts of his struggle with conditions at the mine and his slow conquest of the water that flooded all the lower levels, of disheartening, incompetent labour and the multiplied difficulty of distance from any base of supplies. But that little was all timed to our meeting again. "I will explain all that when I see you," "We will talk of that later," were phrases that cropped out in his letters many times. I did not know, even in the act of going there, just what he expected to bring to pass in our affairs by my being in Los Angeles. I only know that I wanted desperately to see him.