In the years that followed she never knew how long she sat there after the stones had been lifted away, holding in her lap those shreds of torn white doeskin.  Still caught together, though in tatters, by long strings of shells and beads, they shone, a ghostly film of white from out the dimness.  A breath, and the whole would have crumbled into dust.  Yet the beads, she noticed, were still perfect as when strung by slim brown fingers centuries before.  Only half believing it was not all of it a dream, she lifted them strand after strand.  Then, suddenly, she gave a little cry.  Somewhere from out the torn folds a slender chain had slipped.  Trembling with a curiosity that bordered close on terror, she carried it to the light, and there it glowed, a glancing stream of crimson, in her hand.

“Wildenai’s necklace!” she breathed, and hid her face.

There came the sound of a step outside.  The manzanita branches were pushed impatiently aside and he stood before her.

The journey across the channel from Los Angeles had seemed twice as long as when he made it a few weeks before, and he had hurried all the way from the hotel straight to the little cavern.  But now that he had found her again, there seemed to be plenty of time for everything, and he stood quite silent looking down at her.  He was glad he had found her there, glad, in a curious, unreasoning way, for the quiet of the late afternoon, for the faint fragrance of the Mariposa lilies blooming just beyond the ledge.  Yet he let her know nothing of this in what he said.

“So here you are, after all!  I thought I should find you here.”

She had not heard him come and was startled into a cry.

“You!” she gasped, and lifted eyes in which the telltale signs of tears were still quite evident, so evident that, with a woman’s instinct to hide them, she caught up the necklace and held it toward him.

“See what I’ve found!” she exclaimed.

But he paid no heed.  Instead, manlike, he proceeded, quite unconsciously, to say the one thing that could hurt her most.

“I looked for you at the hotel first, then I came on up here.  I knew you wouldn’t go till I came!”

The color that had flooded her face at the sound of his voice faded again.  She was quite white as she asked quietly: 

“How could you know I would stay?”

He laughed easily, settling himself confidently on the moss at her side.

“Because I hadn’t paid you yet,” he answered gaily.  “Don’t you think that was clever of me, Wildenai?”

“I would rather you did not call me that,” she told him coldly, “It sounds irreverent.”  And she dropped her eyes, which had filled again miserably, to the film of white in her lap.  Then, with a pitiful attempt to hurt him in return:  “Of course you realize that I really don’t know much about you.  I don’t want you to think that I distrusted you exactly - " she marvelled at herself that she could say such things to him, but went recklessly on.  “The check wasn’t there, — and so, well, it seemed wisest to wait.  They said you were coming back, and I couldn’t afford to lose it; so I stayed.  Just a matter of business, you see!” She finished in a tone which, except for a suspicious tremble, was satisfactorily disagreeable.