Cairness clasped his hands about one knee and bent back, looking up at the stars,--and far beyond them into the infinity of that Cause of which they and he and all the perplexing problems were but the mere effects. "You mustn't think I haven't thought it over, time and again," he said, after a while. "It's more vital to me than to you; but my way isn't clear. I loved Mrs. Cairness for more than ten years before I could marry her. I should lose her in less than that, I am absolutely certain, if I did as you suggest. She is not so strong a woman as you might suppose. This dry air, this climate, are necessary to her." He hesitated a little, rather loath to speak of his sentiments, and yet glad of the chance to put his arguments in words, for his own greater satisfaction. "You call it picturesque and poetical and all that," he said, "but you only half mean it after all. It is picturesque. It has been absolutely satisfactory. I'm not given to talking about this kind of thing, you know; but most men who have been married two years couldn't say truthfully that they have nothing to regret; that if they had had to buy that time with eternity of damnation and the lake of fire, it would not have come too dear. And I have had no price to pay--" he stopped short, the ring of conviction cut off, as the sound of a bell is when a hand is laid upon it. The hand was that of a fact, of the fact that had confronted him in the Cañon de los Embudos, and that very day by the cottonwoods of the spring-house. "Mrs. Cairness would go where I wished gladly," he added, more evenly; "but if it were to a life very different from this, it would end in death--and I should be the cause of it. There it is." He too rose, impatiently. "Think it over, in any case," urged Forbes; "I am going in, good night." "I have thought it over," said Cairness; "good night." Cairness sat for a long time, smoking and thinking. Then Felipa's voice called to him and he went in to her. She was by the window in a flood of moonlight, herself all in flowing white, with the mantle of black hair upon her shoulders. He put his arm about her and she laid her head against his breast. "I am jealous of him," she said, without any manner of preface. He made no pretence of not understanding. "You have no need to be, dear," he said simply. "He gives you what I can't give," she said. "You give me what no one else could give--the best things in life." "Better than the--other things?" she asked, and he answered, unhesitating, "Yes." There was another silence, and this time he broke it. "Why did you not tell me you had known Forbes, Felipa?" If it had not been that she was commonly and often unaccountably reticent, there might have been some suspicion in the question. But there was only a slight annoyance. Nor was there hesitation in her reply.