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different—a very strange place, if that were true.

Michaelis. The world is a very strange place.

Rhoda. Tell me a little about your life. That seems to have been very strange.

Michaelis. (Vaguely, as he seats himself by the table.) I don't know. I can hardly remember what my life was.

Rhoda. Why is that?

Michaelis. (Gazing at her.) Because, since I came into this house, I have seen the vision of another life.

Rhoda. (With hesitation.) What—other life?

Michaelis. Since my boyhood I have been— (He hesitates.) I have been a wanderer, almost a fugitive—. And I never knew it, till now—I never knew it till—I looked into your face!

Rhoda. (Avoiding his gaze.) How should that make you know?

Michaelis. (Leans nearer.) All my life long I have walked in the light of something to come, some labor, some mission, I have scarcely known what—but I have risen with it and lain down with it, and nothing else has existed for me.—Nothing, until—I lifted my eyes and you stood there. The stars looked down from their places, the earth wheeled on among the stars. Everything was as it had been, and nothing was as it had been; nor ever, ever can it be the same again.

Rhoda. (In a low and agitated voice.) You must not say these things to me. You are—I am not—. You must not think of me so.

Michaelis. I must think of you as I must.

Rhoda. Tell me a little of your boyhood.—What was it like—that place where you lived?

Michaelis. (Becomes absorbed in his own mental pictures as he speaks.) A great table of stone, rising five hundred feet out of the endless waste of sand. A little adobe house, halfway up the mesa, with the desert far below and the Indian village far above. A few peach trees, and a spring—a sacred spring, which the Indians worshipped in secret. A little chapel, which my father had built with his own hands. He often spent the night there, praying. And there, one night, he died. I found him in the morning, lying as if in quiet prayer before the altar.

Rhoda. (After a moment's hush.) What did you do after your father died?

Michaelis. I went away south, into the mountains, and got work on a sheep range. I was a shepherd for five years.

Rhoda. And since then?

Michaelis. (Hesitates.) Since then I have—wandered about, working here and there to earn enough to live on.

Rhoda. I understand well why men take up that life. I should love it myself.

Michaelis. I did n't do it because I loved it.

Rhoda. Why, then?

Michaelis. I was waiting my time.

Rhoda. (In a low tone.) Your time—for what?

Michaelis. To fulfil my life—my real life.

Rhoda. Your—real life? (He sits absorbed in thought without answering. Rhoda continues, after a long pause.) There in the mountains, when you were a shepherd—that was not your real life?

Michaelis. It was the beginning of it.

Rhoda. (With hesitation.) Won't you tell me a little about that time?

Michaelis. In the fall I would drive the sheep south, through the great basin which sloped down into Mexico, and in the spring back again to the mountains.

Rhoda. Were you all alone?

Michaelis. There were a few men on the ranges, but they were no more to me than the sheep—not so much.

Rhoda. Were n't you dreadfully lonely?

Michaelis. No.

Rhoda. You had n't even any books to read?

Michaelis. (Takes a took from his coat pocket.) I had this pocket Bible, that had been my father's. I read that sometimes. But always in a dream, without understanding, without remembering. (His excitement increases.) Yet there came a time when whole chapters started up in my mind, as plain as if the printed page were before me, and I understood it all, both the outer meaning and the inner.

Rhoda. And you did n't know what made the difference?

Michaelis. Yes.

Rhoda. What was it?

Michaelis. I can't tell you that.

Rhoda. Oh, yes!

Michaelis. There are no words to tell of it.