David made no movement to follow her. He had clung to his hope with the desperation of a weak nature, but it was ended now. No interference, no miracle, could restore her to him. He saw--he had to see--that she was lost to him as completely as if death had claimed her. More completely, for death would have made her a stranger. Now it was the Susan he had loved who had looked at him with eyes not even indifferent but charged with a hard hostility. She was the same and yet how different! Hopeless!--Hopeless! He wondered if the word had ever before voiced so abject a despair. He turned to the back of the plateau and saw the faint semblance of a path leading upward to higher levels, a trail worn by the feet of other emigrants who had climbed to scan with longing eyes the weary way to the land of their desire. As he walked up it and the prospect widened on his sight, its message came, clearer with every mounting step. Thus forever would he look out on a blasted world uncheered by sound or color. The stillness that lapped him round was as the stillness of his own dead heart. The mirage quivered brilliant in the distance, and he paused, a solitary shape against the exhausted sky, to think that his dream of love had had no more reality. Beautiful and alluring it had floated in his mind, an illusion without truth or substance. He reached the higher elevation, barren and iron hard, the stone hot to his feet. On three sides the desert swept out to the horizon, held in its awful silence. Across it, a white seam, the Emigrant Trail wound, splindling away into the west, a line of tortuous curves, a loop, a straight streak, and then a tiny thread always pressing on to that wonderful land which he had once seen as a glowing rim on the world's remotest verge. It typified the dauntless effort of man, never flagging, never broken, persisting to its goal. He had not been able to thus persist, the spirit had not reached far enough to know its aim and grasp it. He knew his weakness, his incapacity to cope with the larger odds of life, a watcher not an actor in the battle, and understanding that his failure had come from his own inadequacy he wished that he might die. On one side the eminence broke away in a sheer fall to the earth below. At its base a scattering of sundered bowlders and fragments lay, veiled by a growth of small, bushy shrubs to which a spring gave nourishment. Behind this the long spine of the rock tapered back to the parent ridge that ran, a bristling rampart, east and west. He sat down on the edge of the precipice watching the trail. He had no idea how long he remained thus. A shadow falling across him brought him back to life. He turned and saw Courant standing a few feet from him.