"Then, will it be wrong to go out with me? You need not stay! But see what lies beyond the mountains before you judge it!" He shook his head. "Are you afraid? It will not harm you." He flushed at that. And then began to walk up and down across the patio. She saw Connor white with anxiety, but about Connor and his affairs she had little concern at this moment. She felt only a cruel pleasure in her control over this man, half savage and half child. Now he stopped abruptly before her. "If the world, after I see it, still displeases me, when I return, will you come with me, Ruth? Will you come back to the Garden of Eden?" In the distance Ben Connor was gesturing desperately to make her say yes. But she could not resist a pause--a pause in which torment showed on the face of David. And then, deliberately, she made her eyes soften--made her lips smile. "Yes, David, I will come back!" He leaned a little toward her, then straightened with a shudder and crossed the patio to the Room of Silence. Behind that door he disappeared, and left Connor and the girl alone. The gambler threw down his arms as if abandoning a burden. "Why in the name of God did you let him leave you?" he groaned. "Why? Why? Why?" "He's going to come," asserted Ruth. "Never in a thousand years. The fool will talk to his dummy god in yonder and come out with one of his iced looks and talk about 'judgment'! Bah!" "He'll come." "What makes you think so?" "Because--I know." "You should have waited--to-morrow you could have done it, maybe, but to-day is too soon." "Listen to me, Ben. I know him. I know his childish, greedy mind. He wants me just as much as he wants his own way. It's partly because I'm new to him, being a woman. It's chiefly because I'm the first thing he's ever met that won't do what he wants. He's going to try to stay with me until he bends me." She flushed with angry excitement. "It's playing with fire, Ruth. I know you're clever, but--" "You don't know how clever, but I'm beginning to guess what I can do. I've lost all feeling about that cruel barbarian, Ben. That poor little harmless, pretty colt--oh, I want to make David Eden burn for that! And I can do it. I'm going to wind him around my finger. I've thought of ways while I stood looking at him just now. I know how I can smile at him, and use my eyes, and woo him on, and pretend to be just about to yield and come back with him--then grow cold the next minute and give him his work to do over again. I'm going to make him crawl on his knees in the dust. I'm going to make a fool of him before people. I'm going to make him sign over his horses to us to keep them out of his vicious power. And I can do it--I hate him so that I know I can make him really love me. Oh, I know he doesn't really love me now. I know you're right about him. He simply wants me as he'd want another horse. I'll change him. I'll break him. When he's broken I'm going to laugh in his face--and tell him--to remember Timeh!"