to the
life of them and the hearts of them by God Himself. To that they had
been born. For this love's sake they had come into the world, and
the mingling of their lives was to be the Perfect Life, the intended,
ordained union of the soul of man with the soul of woman, indissoluble,
harmonious as music, beautiful beyond all thought, a foretaste of
Heaven, a hostage of immortality.

No, he, Vanamee, could never, never forget, never was the edge of his
grief to lose its sharpness, never would the lapse of time blunt the
tooth of his pain. Once more, as he sat there, looking off across the
ranches, his eyes fixed on the ancient campanile of the Mission church,
the anguish that would not die leaped at his throat, tearing at his
heart, shaking him and rending him with a violence as fierce and as
profound as if it all had been but yesterday. The ache returned to his
heart a physical keen pain; his hands gripped tight together, twisting,
interlocked, his eyes filled with tears, his whole body shaken and riven
from head to heel.

He had lost her. God had not meant it, after all. The whole matter had
been a mistake. That vast, wonderful love that had come upon them had
been only the flimsiest mockery. Abruptly Vanamee rose. He knew the
night that was before him. At intervals throughout the course of his
prolonged wanderings, in the desert, on the mesa, deep in the canon,
lost and forgotten on the flanks of unnamed mountains, alone under the
stars and under the moon's white eye, these hours came to him, his grief
recoiling upon him like the recoil of a vast and terrible engine.
Then he must fight out the night, wrestling with his sorrow, praying
sometimes, incoherent, hardly conscious, asking "Why" of the night and
of the stars.

Such another night had come to him now. Until dawn he knew he must
struggle with his grief, torn with memories, his imagination assaulted
with visions of a vanished happiness. If this paroxysm of sorrow was to
assail him again that night, there was but one place for him to be. He
would go to the Mission--he would see Father Sarria; he would pass the
night in the deep shadow of the aged pear trees in the Mission garden.

He struck out across Quien Sabe, his face, the face of an ascetic, lean,
brown, infinitely sad, set toward the Mission church. In about an hour
he reached and crossed the road that led northward from Guadalajara
toward the Seed ranch, and, a little farther on, forded Broderson Creek