e him with a profound sadness. He realized how
different his feelings were now from what they had been when she knelt
before him in the darkened room and, not daring to plead for mercy
for her uncle, had asked him only for the pity for herself that he had
seemed so slow to give. Something reproached him now for his coldness
at the moment that he should have thought of her suffering before his
own.

The crystal brightness of the day brought no elation to his thoughts.
His attention fixed on nothing that did not revert to Nan and his
hunger to see her again. If he regarded the majestic mountain before
him, it was only to recall the day she had fed him at its foot, long
before she loved him--he thought of that truth now--when he lay dying
on it. If the black reaches of the lava beds came within view, it was
only to remind him that, among those desolate rocks, this simple,
blue-eyed girl, frail in his eyes as a cobweb despite her graceful
strength, had intrusted all her life and happiness to him, given her
fresh lips to his, endured without complaint the headstrong ardor of
his caresses and, by the pretty mockery of her averted eyes, provoked
his love to new adventure.

Memory seemed that morning as keen as the fickle air--so sharply did
it bring back to him the overwhelming pictures of their happiness
together. And out of his acute loneliness rose vague questionings and
misgivings. He said to himself in bitter self-reproach that she would
not have gone if he had been to her all he ought to have been in the
crisis of that night. If harm should befall her now! How the thought
clutched and dragged at his heart. Forebodings tortured him, and in
the penumbra of his thoughts seemed to leave something he could not
shake off--a vague, haunting fear, as if of some impending tragedy
that should wreck their future.

It was while riding in this way that his eyes, reading mechanically
the wagon trail he was aimlessly following--for no reason other
than that it brought him, though forbidden, a little closer to
her--arrested his attention. He checked his horse. Something, the
trail told him, had happened. Page had stopped his horses. Page had
met two men on horseback coming from the Gap. After a parley--for
the horses had tramped around long enough for one--the wagon had
turned completely from the trail and struck out across the desert,
north; the two horsemen, or one with a led horse, had started back
for the Gap.

All of this de