Talavenka listened with perfect equanimity to Helen's glowing account of the opportunities for education in the girls' school at Milton. Then she said with more than a quiet manner,--it was a poise of all the faculties, that a white person seldom possesses: "You are kind, but I ought to stay here with my mother for awhile. She needs me." "But would she not be willing to have you go away for a little while just to gain more power for your people? Mother, would you be willing to have Talavenka stay with us this winter?" "I have already talked with your father and Mr. and Mrs. Masters about Talavenka and we are ready to take her into our home and treat her like one of our own circle," said Esther, who was chairman of the missionary committee in her church and a great enthusiast in all forms of missionary work. Talavenka turned her black eyes to Mrs. Douglas. Her face shone. The light of her Christian faith illuminated her countenance like a gleam of sunshine. It was so marked that both Mrs. Douglas and Helen were startled by it. "I do not know how to thank you. But my mother needs me this winter. I must stay with her." She said it so gently, with such a complete sense of joyousness and an absence of all thought of renunciation, that Helen was profoundly moved. There was no possibility of changing her mind or insisting. There was something about Talavenka's simple statement that was distinctly final. When the girl rose to go, Helen noticed the reddish brown water jar that Talavenka had dropped by the tent opening when she had entered. "Yes," she said, as she put the jar on her back after passing the cord through the ears of it, "I am going down to the spring. How glad I am to be so well. Jesus helps me to bear all things." She went out and half an hour later, Helen, lying on her cot outside the tent, saw her again coming up the trail with the swinging trot peculiar to the Hopi women, the full jar on her back, and she was singing, not the old song that her mother still sung, but a Christian hymn, "A little talk with Jesus makes it right, all right." Helen watched her until she vanished behind the first cluster of grey houses. Talavenka had gone back to her people for awhile. But her torch was aflame, the torch of that faith that is destined in time to kindle the grey rock of Oraibi into a beacon of illumination that shall give healing and salvation to all those darkened minds and make the desert to blossom like the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley. The second day Elijah Clifford and Paul began to pack up, ready to break camp the following morning and start back to Oraibi. Van Shaw's condition was not much changed except that he was more rational. This was a hopeful symptom and the doctor made the most of it, encouraging Mrs. Van Shaw all he could.