Deserts and mountains remain, duties crowd and press, hearts ache but the world rushes on. The weeks that followed showed these two that a great love is eternal.
Brownleigh did not try to put the thought of it out of his life, but rather let it glorify the common round. Day after day passed and he went from post to post, from hogan to mesa, and back to his shanty again, always with the thought of her companionship, and found it sweet. Never had he been less cheery when he met his friends, though there was a quiet dignity, a tender reserve behind it all that a few discerning ones perceived. They said at the Fort that he was losing flesh, but if so, he was gaining muscle. His lean brown arms were never stronger, and his fine strong face was never sad when any one was by. It was only in the night-time alone upon the moonlit desert, or in his little quiet dwelling place when he talked with his Father, and told all the loneliness and heartache. His people found him more sympathetic, more painstaking, more tireless than ever before, and the work prospered under his hand.
The girl in the city deliberately set herself to forget.
The first few days after she left him had been a season of ecstatic joy mingled with deep depression, as she alternately meditated upon the fact of a great love, or faced its impossibility.
She had scorched Milton Hamar with her glance of aversion, and avoided him constantly even in the face of protest from her family, until he had made excuse and left the party at Pasadena. There, too, Aunt Maria had relieved them of her annoying interference, and the return trip taken by the southern route had been an unmolested time for meditation for the girl. She became daily more and more dissatisfied with herself and her useless, ornamental life. Some days she read the little book, and other days she shut it away and tried to get back to her former life, telling herself it was useless to attempt to change herself. She had found that the little book gave her a deep unrest and a sense that life held graver, sweeter things than just living to please one's self. She began to long for home, and the summer round of gaieties, with which to fill the emptiness of her heart.
As the summer advanced there was almost a recklessness sometimes about the way she planned to have a good time every minute; yet in the quiet of her own room there would always come back the yearning that had been awakened in the desert and would not be silenced.