She closed her eyes and rested.  Soon the laboring of heart and breath calmed to normal, so that she could not hear them.  Then she lay perfectly motionless.  With eyes shut she seemed still to look, and what she saw was the sunlight through the blood and flesh of her eyelids.  It was red, as rare a hue as the blue of sky.  So piercing did it grow that she had to shade her eyes with her arm.

Again the strange, rapt glow suffused her body.  Never in all her life had she been so absolutely alone.  She might as well have been in her grave.  She might have been dead to all earthy things and reveling in spirit in the glory of the physical that had escaped her in life.  And she abandoned herself to this influence.

She loved these dry, dusty cinders; she loved the crater here hidden from all save birds; she loved the desert, the earth—­above all, the sun.  She was a product of the earth—­a creation of the sun.  She had been an infinitesimal atom of inert something that had quickened to life under the blazing magic of the sun.  Soon her spirit would abandon her body and go on, while her flesh and bone returned to dust.  This frame of hers, that carried the divine spark, belonged to the earth.  She had only been ignorant, mindless, feelingless, absorbed in the seeking of gain, blind to the truth.  She had to give.  She had been created a woman; she belonged to nature; she was nothing save a mother of the future.  She had loved neither Glenn Kilbourne nor life itself.  False education, false standards, false environment had developed her into a woman who imagined she must feed her body on the milk and honey of indulgence.

She was abased now—­woman as animal, though saved and uplifted by her power of immortality.  Transcendental was her female power to link life with the future.  The power of the plant seed, the power of the earth, the heat of the sun, the inscrutable creation-spirit of nature, almost the divinity of God—­these were all hers because she was a woman.  That was the great secret, aloof so long.  That was what had been wrong with life—­the woman blind to her meaning, her power, her mastery.

So she abandoned herself to the woman within her.  She held out her arms to the blue abyss of heaven as if to embrace the universe.  She was Nature.  She kissed the dusty cinders and pressed her breast against the warm slope.  Her heart swelled to bursting with a glorious and unutterable happiness.

That afternoon as the sun was setting under a gold-white scroll of cloud Carley got back to Deep Lake.

A familiar lounging figure crossed her sight.  It approached to where she had dismounted.  Charley, the sheep herder of Oak Creek!

“Howdy!” he drawled, with his queer smile.  “So it was you-all who had this Deep Lake section?”

“Yes.  And how are you, Charley?” she replied, shaking hands with him.

“Me?  Aw, I’m tip-top.  I’m shore glad you got this ranch.  Reckon I’ll hit you for a job.”