For a long time the ordeal never got so far as argument. It was revel of the senses, unleashed at last, untamed by the past, fiercer and stronger and more irresistible for all disuse. Melancholy and terrible was the truth that his desert years, so hard, so clean, so cold, so pure, the restraint of his enforced exile, had developed in him instincts masterless in their importunity. Life shrieking out of his flesh and blood for the future that nature demanded! There was revolt here, conscienceless revolt against the futility of manhood, voices from the old bones of his ancestors, from the dim and mystic past. Here at last was revealed the deepest secret of the desert, the eternal law men read in its lonely, naked face--self-preservation and reproduction. The individual lived and fought and perished, but the species survived. Adam’s instinctive reaction seemed that of a savage into whose surging blood had been ejected some inhibitory current of humanism which chafed at the quivering shores of his veins and tried to dam the flood. He was like a strong man convulsed by fever. Like the strung thread of a bent bow he vibrated. There came a knocking at the gate of his mind. The tempter! The voice of the serpent! Nature or devil, it was all one--a mighty and eloquent and persuasive force. It whispered to Adam that he was alone on the desert. Fate had been cruel. Love had betrayed him. Life had denied him. A criminal, surely not forgotten by justice, he could never leave the lonely wastelands to live. A motherless, fatherless girl, with no kith or kin, had been left in his care, and he had saved her, succored her. Care and health and love had made her beautiful. By all the laws of nature she was his, to hold, to cherish, to cheer the lonely, gray years. He had but to open his arms and call to her, reveal to her the mystery and glory of life, and she would be his forever. Unconsciously she herself leaned toward this fate, tempting him in all her innocence. She would grow into a glorious woman--the keen, sweet, fierce youth of her answering to the work of the desert. Were not all desert flowers more rare and vivid--were not all desert creatures more beautiful and strong than their like elsewhere? Genie would be his, as the eagle had its mate, and she would never know any other life. She would be compensation for his suffering, a companion for his wandering. Think! the joy of her, the thrill of her! The wonderful fire of her dark eyes and the dance of her curls and the red lips ripe for kisses! No man had any right to deny himself immortality. What was the world and its customs to him? Where was the all-wise and beneficent God who looked after the miserable and forlorn? Life was life, and that was everything. Beauty in life--that was eternal, the meaning of nature, and every man must love it, share it, and mark the image of himself upon the future. Lastly and most potent, the present fleeting hour