n, beckoning frantically from the receding shore, was miles
behind. "Judith!" he said, and he scarce recognized his own voice.
"Judith!" he struggled as a swimmer in a drowning clutch. Then his patron
saint threw him a life-line and he saved the situation.

"Judith!" he said, a third time, and now he knew his voice. It was the
voice of the man who tilted at life picturesquely in a broad-brimmed hat,
who loved his darling griefs and fitted them as a Rembrandt fits its
background. And still, in the same voice, the voice he knew, he said: "I
feel as if we had died and our souls were meeting. You know Aldrich's
exquisite lines:

"Somewhere in desolate, wind-swept space,
In twilight land--no man's land--
Two hurrying shapes met face to face
And bade each other stand.

"'And who are you?' cried one, agape,
Shuddering in the gloaming light.
I know not,' said the other shape,
'I only died last night.'"

"'I only died last night!'" she repeated the line, slowly, significantly.
In her questioning she forgot the night, the desolation, the presence of
the man. Had she died last night? Had youth, the joy of living, her
infinite capacity for love, had they died when Peter, with the ugly haste
of the man without a nice sense of the time that should elapse between the
old and the new love, had spurred away cheerfully at the beck of another
woman? And now the desert, this earth-mother as she called it, in the
Indian way, had given him back to her, thrown them together as driftwood
in the still ocean of space. She drew a long breath, the breath of one
waking from an anguished dream. A wild, unreasoning gladness woke in her
heart, the joy of living swept her back again to life. She had not died
last night, she was riding through the wilderness with Peter.

"Look!" she whispered. The sky had lost its forbidding blackness. The
sharp notches of the mountains, faintly outlined in white, undulated
through an eternity of space. Venus hung in the west, burning softly as a
shaded lamp. The trail they climbed seemed to end in her pale yellow
light.

Peter had saved the situation, but the wild beauty of the night stirred in
him that gift of silvery speech that was ever his tribute to the sex,
rather than the woman. He bent towards Judith. A loosened strand of her
hair blew across his cheek. The breakneck ride to Kitty was already the
madness of a dead and gone incarnation. He pointed to the pale star, and
told her it