Memory surged up in Adam, moving him to speak aloud his own deeply hidden secret, by the revelation of which he might share the shame and remorse and agony of Magdalene Virey. “I will tell you my story,” he said, and the words were as cruel blades at the closed portals of his heart. Huskily he began, halting often, breathing hard, while the clammy sweat beaded upon his brow. What was this life--these years that deceived with forgetfulness? His trouble was there as keen as on the day it culminated. He told Magdalene of his boyhood, of his love for his brother Guerd, and of their life in the old home, where all, even friendships of the girls, was for Guerd and nothing for him. As he progressed, Magdalene Virey’s own agony was forgotten. The quiver of her body changed to strung intensity, the heaving of her bosom was no longer the long-drawn breath to relieve oppression. Remorselessly as she had bared her great secret, Adam confessed his little, tawdry, miserable romance--his wild response to the lure of a vain Mexican girl, and his fall, and the words that had disillusioned him. “Ah, so long ago and far away!” echoed Magdalene Virey, all the richness of her wonderful voice gathering in a might of woman’s fury. “Oh, such a thing for a girl to say!... And Adam--_she_, this Margarita, was the only woman you ever loved--ever knew that way?” “Yes.” “And she was the cause of your ruin?” “Indeed she was, poor child!” “The damned hussy!” cried Magdalene, passionately. “And you--only eighteen years old? How I hate her!... And what of the man who won her fickle heart?” Adam bowed as a tree in a storm. “He--he was my brother.” “Oh _no_!” she burst out. “The boy you loved--the _brother_! Oh, it can’t be true!” “It was true.... And, Magdalene--I killed him.” Then with a gasp she enveloped him, in a fierce, protective frenzy of tenderness, arms around him, pressing his face to her breast, hanging over him as a mother over her child. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! How terrible!... Your _brother_!... And I thought my secret, my sin, my burden so terrible! Oh, my heart bleeds for you.... Wansfell, poor unhappy wanderer!” CHAPTER XVIII July! At last the endlessly long, increasingly hot June days brought the leaden-hazed month of July, when no sane man ever attempted to cross Death Valley while the sun was high. In all hours, even in the darkness, the bold, rugged slopes of the Panamints reflected sinister shades of red. And the valley was one of gray swirling shadows and waving veils of heat like transparent smoke. Beyond that vast, strange, dim valley rose the drab and ocher slopes of the Funeral Mountains, sweeping up to the bronze battlements and on to the lilac and purple peaks blurred in the leaden-hued haze that obscured the sky. The sun was sky-broad, an illimitable flare, with a lurid white heart into which no man could look. * * * * *