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I said he was quite capable of taking care of himself.

“Does your husband want all the water?” she persisted. “Do I understand that he must have it all?”

I supposed she was talking of the Snow Bank, and since she was determined we should discuss the affair in this social way, I said he would have to have a great deal; and I told her about the distance the power would have to be sent, and about the mines and the smelters, and all the rest of it, for it was no use to belittle the scheme. I had got started unintentionally, and I saw by her face that I had made an impression. It is a small-featured, rather set, colorless face, not so pretty as Tom pretended, but very delicate and pure; but now it became suddenly the face of a fierce little bigot, and enthusiast to boot.

“It shall never go through,–not that scheme–not if”–Then she remembered to whom she was talking, and set her lips together, and two great shiny drops stood in her eyes.

“Don’t, don’t, you child!” I said. “Don’t worry about their old scheme! If it must come it will come; but as a rule, a scheme, my dear, is the last thing that ever does go through. There’s plenty of time.”

“But I can’t give in,” she said. “No; I must try to hinder it all I can. I will be honest with you. I like you all; of all the strangers who have come here I never liked any people better. But your husband–must not –set his heart on all that water! It doesn’t belong to him.”

“Does it belong to you, dear?”

“The sight of it belongs to me,” she said. “I will not have the place all littered up with their pipes and power-plants. Look out there! Look at that! Has any one the right to come here and spoil such a lovely thing as that?”–This is what it is to be the daughter of an artist.

“And how about the other despoiler,” I asked–“the young man with the pneumatic pipe?”

“The ‘pneumatic pipe’!” she repeated.

“‘Pump,’ I mean. Is he to be allowed all over the place to do as he pleases? His scaling-ladders are littering up the bluffs–not that they incommode the bluffs any; but if I lived here, I should want to brush them away as I would sweep the cobwebs from my walls.”

“I do not own the bluffs,” she said in a distant, tremulous voice.

But the true answer to my question, as I surmise, was the sudden, helpless flush which rose, wave upon wave, covering her poor little face, blotting out all expression but that of painful girlish shame. Here, if I’m not mistaken, will be found the heart of the difficulty. Miss Malcolm’s sympathies are evidently with compressed air rather than with electrical transmission. I shall tell Tom he need waste no more arguments on her. Let him first compound with his rival of the pump.

* * * * *

I suppose there is just such a low, big moon as this looking in upon you where you sit, you little dot of a woman, lost in the piazza perspectives of the Coronado; and you might think small things of our present habitation–a little tent among the bushes, with wind-blown weeds against the moon, shifting their shadow-patterns over our canvas walls. But you’d not think small things of our Sand Springs Fall by night, that glimmers on the dark cliff opposite–cliff, and mist-like cataract, and the low moon throwing the shadow of the bluff across it, all repeated in the stiller, darker picture of the lagoon. I shall not inflict much of this sort of thing upon you; but the senseless beauty of it all gives one a heartache. Why should it be here, where you and I shall never see it together–where I shall leave it soon, never to see it again? Tom says we are coming back–when the great scheme is under way. Ah, the scheme, the scheme! It looks very far away to-night, and so do some other schemes that I had set my heart on unaware, foolish old woman that I am. As if there was only one way in this–world for young men and women to be happy!