Tisdale closed the book and laid it down. Furrows seamed his face, changing, re-forming, to the inner upheaval. After awhile, he lifted Weatherbee's watch from the desk and mechanically pressed the spring. The lower case opened, but the picture he remembered was not there. In its place was the face of the other child, his namesake, "Bee."
Out in the patio the pool rippled ceaselessly; the fountain threw its silver ribbon of spray, and Beatriz waited, listening, with her eyes turned to the room she had left. At last she heard his step. It was the tread of a man whose decision was made. She sank down on the curb of the basin near one of the palms. Behind her an open door, creaking in the light wind, swung wide, and beyond it the upper flume stretched back to the natural reservoir where she had been imprisoned by the fallen pine tree. His glance, as he crossed the court, moved from her through this door and back to her face.
"You were right," he said. "But it would have been different if David had known about his child. His great heart was starved."
She was silent. Her glance fell to the fountain. A ray of sunshine slanting across it formed a rainbow.
"But my mistake was greater than yours," he went on, and his voice struck its minor chord; "I have no excuse for throwing away those four days. I never can repair that, but I pledge myself to make you forget my injustice to you."
At this she rose. "You were not unjust—knowing David as you did. You taught me how fine, how great he was. Silva—would have been proud of his name."
There was another silence. Tisdale looked off again through the open door to the distant basin, and her glance returned to the fountain. "See!" she exclaimed. "A double rainbow!"
"Fate is with us again," he replied. "She's promising a better fight. But there is one debt more, soldier," and, catching her swift look, he saw the sparkles break softly in her eyes. "My ship sails for Alaska the tenth; I shall stay indefinitely, and I want you to pay me—in full—before I go."
End of Project Gutenberg's The Rim of the Desert, by Ada Woodruff Anderson