Gallito was not an observant person,
fortunately, and, hastily changing the subject, he again expressed his
thanks and departed.
He left the next morning for Los Angeles to the regret of his
benefactress, Jimmy and the station agent.
CHAPTER VIII
The train which bore Pearl and her father to Colina had already
completed its smooth progress through smiling foot hills and had begun a
steep and winding ascent among wild gorges and great overhanging rocks
before she noticed the change.
For the greater part of the journey she had sat motionless, huddled in a
corner of the seat, a thick veil covering her face; but now she began to
observe the physical changes in the landscape with a somber
satisfaction, and, for the first time, accepted the mountains
listlessly, almost gratefully, instead of rebelliously. In truth any
change was grateful to her; she did not want to think of the desert or
be reminded of it, and this transition, so marked, so sharply defined as
to make the brief railway journey from the plains below seem the passage
to another world, was especially welcome.
The human desire for change is rooted in the conviction, a vain and
deceptive one, that an entirely different environment must include or
create a new world of thought and emotion. So for once the Pearl's
desire was for the hills. She who had ever exulted in the wide, free
spaces of the desert, who had found the echo of her own heart in its
eternal mutation, its luring illusions, its mystery and its beauty, now
turned to the austere, shadowed, silent mountains as if begging them to
enfold her and hold her and hide her.
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