The next time she spoke to him was that evening at dusk. Frogs were trilling, and a belated mocking bird was singing low, full-throated melodies. Yet these beautiful sounds only accentuated the solemn desert stillness. “Wansfell--you remember--once we talked of God,” she said, very low. “Yes, I remember,” replied Adam. “Are you just where you were--then?” “About the same, I guess.” “Are you sure you understand yourself?” “Sure? Oh no. I change every day.” “Wansfell, what do you call the thing in you--the will to tarry here? The manhood that I trusted?... The forgetfulness of self?... What do you call this strength of yours that fulfilled my faith--that gave me to God utterly--that enables me to die happy--that will be the salvation of my child?” “Manhood? Strength?” echoed Adam, in troubled perplexity. “I’m just sorry for you--for the little girl.” “Ah yes, sorry! Indeed you are! But you don’t know yourself.... Wansfell, there was a presence beside my bed--just a moment before I called you. Something neither light nor shadow in substance--something neither life nor death.... It is gone now. But when I am dead it will come to you. _I_ will come to you--like that.... Somewhere out in the solitude and loneliness of your desert--at night when it is dark and still--and the heavens look down--there you will face your soul.... You’ll see the divine in man.... You’ll realize that the individual dies, but the race lives.... You’ll have thundered at you from the silence, the vast, lonely land you love, from the stars and the infinite beyond--that your soul is immortal.... That this _Thing_ in you is God!” When the voice ceased, so vibrant and full at the close, so more than physical, Adam bowed his head and plodded over the soft sand out to the open desert where mustering shadows inclosed him, and he toiled to and fro in the silence--a man bent under the Atlantean doubt and agony and mystery of the world. The next day Genie’s mother died. * * * * *