"I hardly know what to think,--how I feel. You interest me so much as you talk that I wish you to succeed: I picture your success. And yet it maddens me to hear you talk of the Americans in that way,--also to know that your house will be greater than ours,--that we will be forgotten. But--yes, tell me all. What will you do then?" "I shall have California, in the first place, scratched for the gold that I believe lies somewhere within her. When that great resource _is_ located and developed I shall publish in every American newspaper the extraordinary agricultural advantages of the country. In a word, my object is to make California a great State and its name synonymous with my own. As I told you before, for fame as fame I care nothing; I do not care if I am forgotten on my death-bed; but with my blood biting my veins I must have action while living. Shall I say that I have a worthier motive in wishing to aid in the development of civilization? But why worthier? Merely a higher form of selfishness. The best and the worst of motives are prompted by the same instinct." "I would advise you," she said, slowly, "never to marry. Your wife would be very unhappy." "But no one has greater scorn than you for the man who spends his life with his lips at the chalice of the poppy." "True, I had forgotten them." She rose abruptly. "Let us go back," she said. "It is better not to stay too long." As they walked down the canon she looked at him furtively. The men of her race were almost all tall and finely-proportioned, but they did not suggest strength as this man did. And his face,--it was so grimly determined at times that she shrank from it, then drew near, fascinated. It had no beauty at all--according to Californian standards; she could not know that it represented all that intellect, refinement and civilization, generally, would do for the human race for a century to come,--but it had a subtle power, an absolute audacity, an almost contemptuous fearlessness in its bold, fine outline, a dominating intelligence in the keen deeply-set eyes, and a hint of weakness, where and what she could not determine, that mystified and magnetized her. "I know you a little better," she said, "just a little,--enough to make my curiosity ache and jump. At the same time, I know now what I did not before,--that I might climb and mine and study and watch, and you would always be beyond me. There is something subtle and evasive about you--something I seem to be close to always, yet never can see or grasp."