“Genie, let me make sure you understand,” he said, gravely. “I love you, too, as if you were my little sister. And if your uncle doesn’t come I’ll take you somewhere--find you a home. But I never--much as I would like to--never can take care of you always.” “Why?” she flashed, with her terrible directness. Adam had begun his development of Genie by telling the truth; he had always abided by it; and now, in these awakening days for her, he must never veer from the truth. “If I tell you why--will you promise never to speak of it--so long as you live?” he asked, solemnly. “Never! I promise. Never, Wanny!” “Genie, I am an outcast. I am a hunted man. I can never go back to civilization and stay.” Then he told her the story of the ruin of his life. When he finished she fell weeping upon his shoulder and clung to him. For Adam the moment was sad and sweet--sad because a few words had opened up the dark, tragic gulf of his soul; and sweet because the passionate grief of a child assured him that even he, wanderer as he was, knew something of sympathy and love. “But, Wanny, you--could--go and--be--pun--ished--and then--come back!” she cried, between sobs. “You’d--never--have to--hide--any more.” Out of her innocence and simplicity she had spoken confounding truth. What a terrible truth! Those words of child wisdom sowed in Adam the seed of a terrible revolt. Revolt--yea, revolt against this horrible need to hide--this fear and dread of punishment that always and forever so bitterly mocked his manhood! If he could find the strength to rise to the heights of Genie’s wisdom--divine philosophy of a child!--he would no longer hate his shadowed wandering steps down the naked shingles and hidden trails of the lonely desert. But, alas! whence would come that strength? Not from the hills! Not from the nature that had made him so strong, so fierce, so sure to preserve his life! It could only come from the spirit that had stood in the dusky twilight beside a dying woman’s side. It could come only from the spirit to whom a child prayed while kneeling at her mother’s grave. And for Adam that spirit held aloof, illusive as the specters of the dead, beyond his grasp, an invisible medium, if indeed it was not a phantom, that seemed impossible of reality in the face of the fierce, ruthless, inevitable life and death and decay of the desert. Could God be nature--that thing, that terrible force, light, fire, water, pulse--that quickening of plant, flesh, stone, that dying of all only to renew--that endless purpose and progress, from the first whirling gas globe of the universe, throughout the ages down to the infinitesimal earth so fixed in its circling orbit, so pitiful in its present brief fertility? The answer was as unattainable as to pluck down the stars, as hopeless as to think of the fleeting of the years, as mysterious as the truth of where man came from and whence he was to go. * * * * *