When the twelve months were run she philosophically admitted the end of it all, and parted with him--apparently--without a pang. If, at the moment of parting, any regrets were felt by either because of the separation, it was he, not she, who would have chosen to drift longer down the stream. The year had run its course; she would again take up the old life. This could not last. Perhaps--who knows?--in time he might have palled on her. No doubt, in time, his weak nature would have wearied her; her own was too eager for strong emotions, to find in him a fitting mate. Whether, at the last, she wrote to her husband, or if he came to her when the year came to its end, no one knows. But one day the people of the desert saw her back at the adobes on the bluff. She returned as suddenly as she had disappeared. * * * * * She seems to have settled into the old groove again. She moves in the same apathetic way as before the stirring events of her life. In her letter she said she would not be sorry. It is not probable that she ever was, or ever will be; but neither is it likely that she has ever seen the affair from the point of view a moralist would take. Her limited intelligence only allowed her to perceive the dreariness of her own poor life, and when her longings touched no responsive chord in the man whom she had married, she deliberately took one year of her existence and hung its walls with all the gorgeous tapestries and rich paintings that could be wrought by the witchery of those magic days in the Pacific. Fires have burned as fiercely within that woman’s breast as ever burned the fires of Kilauea; and when they were ready to burst their bounds, she fled in her impulse to the coral isles of the peaceful Western sea, and there her ears heard the sound, and her heart learned the meaning of words that have left no visible sign upon her--the wondrous, sweet words of a dream, whispered to her unceasingly, while she gave herself up to an enchantment as mad and bewildering as that of the rhythmic hula-hula. If she sinned, she does not seem to know it. Going about at her work, as before, the expressionless face is a mask; yet it may be she is moving in a dream-world, wherein she lives over once again the months that were hers--once--in the far Hawaiian Isles. [Illustration] AN OLD SQUAW She had been lying by the stone wall all day. And the sun was so hot that the blood beating in her ears sounded like the White Man’s fire-horse that had just pulled a freight train into the station, and was grunting and drinking down at the water tank a hundred yards away. It was getting all the water it wanted; why couldn’t she have all the water she wanted, too?