"I've heard a young buck talk to a young squaw--before he married her. The same line of junk!" Connor must be right. He came from the great city. But before that ride was over she was repeating that warning very much as Odysseus used the flower of Hermes against the arts of Circe. For the Garden of Eden, as they came back to the house after the circuit, seemed to her very much like a little kingdom, and the monarch thereof was inviting her in dumb-show to be the queen of the realm. _CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE_ At the house they were met by one of the servants who had been waiting for David to receive from the master definite orders concerning some woodchopping. For the trees of the garden were like children to David of Eden, and he allowed only the ones he himself designated to be cut for timber or fuel. He left the girl with manifest reluctance. "For when I leave you of what do you think, and what do you do? I am like the blind." She felt this speech was peculiar in character. Who but David of Eden could have been jealous of the very thoughts of another? And smiling at this, she went into the patio where Ben Connor was still lounging. Few things had ever been more gratifying to the gambler than the sight of the girl's complacent smile, for he knew that she was judging David. "What happened?" he asked. "Nothing worth repeating. But I think you're wrong, Ben. He isn't a barbarian. He's just a child." "That's another word for the same thing. Ever see anything more brutal than a child? The wildest savage that ever stepped is a saint compared with a ten-year-old boy." "Perhaps. He acts like ten years. When I mention leaving the valley he flies into a tantrum; he has taken me so much for granted that he has even picked out the site for my house." "As if you'd ever stay in a place like this!" He covered his touch of anxiety with loud laughter. "I don't know," she was saying thoughtfully a moment later. "I like it--a lot." "Anything seems pretty good after Lukin. But when your auto is buzzing down Broadway--" She interrupted him with a quick little laugh of excitement. "But do you really think I can make him leave the valley?" "Of course I'm sure." "He says there's a law against it." "I tell you, Ruth, you're his law now; not whatever piffle is in that Room of Silence." She looked earnestly at the closed door. Her silence had always bothered the gambler, and this one particularly annoyed him. "Let's hear your thoughts?" he asked uneasily. "It's just an idea of mine that inside that room we can find out everything we want to know about David Eden." "What do we want to know?" growled Connor. "I know everything that's necessary. He's a nut with a gang of the best horses that ever stepped. I'm talking horse, not David Eden. If I have to make the fool rich, it isn't because I want to." She returned no direct answer, but after a moment: "I wish I knew." "What?" She became profoundly serious.