“My daughter Ruth was not Virey’s child,” she went on, her voice low, yet clear as a bell. “I was only nineteen--a fool--mad--driven. I thought I was in love, but it was only one of those insane spells that so often ruin women.... For years I kept the secret. Then I could not keep it any longer. At the height of Virey’s goodness to me, and his adoration, and his wonderful love for Ruth, I told him the truth. I _had_ to tell it.... That killed his soul. He lived only to make me suffer. The sword he held over my head was the threat to tell my secret to Ruth. I could not bear that. A thousand deaths would have been preferable to that.... So in the frenzy of our trouble we started west for the desert. My father and Ruth followed us--caught up with us at Sacramento. Virey hated Ruth as passionately as he had loved her. I dared not risk him near her in one of his terrible moods. So I sent Ruth away with my father, somewhere to southern California. She did not know it was parting forever. But, O God in heaven--how I knew it!... Then, in my desperation, I dared Virey to do his worst. I had ruined him and I would pay to the last drop of blood in my bitter heart. We came to Death Valley, as I told you, because the terror and desolation seemed to Virey to be as close to a hell on earth as he could find to hide me. Here he began indeed to make me suffer--dirt and vermin and thirst and hunger and pain! Oh! the horror of it all comes back to me!... But even Death Valley cheated him. You came, Wansfell, and now--at last--I believe in God!” Adam wrapped a long arm around her trembling body and held her close. At last she had confessed her secret. It called to the unplumbed depths of him. And the cry in his heart was for the endless agony of woman. And it was a bitter cry of doubt. If Magdalene Virey had at last found faith in God, it was more than Adam had found, though she called him the instrument of her salvation. A fierce and terrible rage flamed in him for the ruin of her. Like a lion he longed to rise up to slay. Blood and death were the elements that equalized wrong. Yet through his helpless fury whispered a still voice into his consciousness--she had been miserable and now she was at peace; she had been lost and now she was saved. He could not get around that. His desert passion halted there. He must go on alone into the waste places and ponder over the wonder of this woman and what had transformed her. He must remember her soul-moving words and, away somewhere in the solitude and silence, learn if the love she intimated was a terrible truth. It could not be true now, yet the shaking of her slender form communicated itself to his, and there was inward tumult, strange, new, a convulsive birth of a sensation dead these many years--dead since that dusky-eyed Margarita Arallanes had tilted her black head to say, “Ah, so long ago and far away!”