, and far across the earth's floor, which
looked somewhat like a wonderful mosaic of opals and jade at this hour, a
Mexican goatherd was driving his flock. That was the only sign of life to
be seen or felt, if you except the noise of locusts in the mesquite near
by and the spasmodic progress of a horned toad in the sand outside
Sylvia's gate.

Yet she was looking away to the vibrating horizon, still as hot as an
oven, as yearningly as if at any moment a knight might ride over the rim
of the desert to rescue her, or as if a brother were coming to put an end
to the existence of a Bluebeard who, obviously, did not exist.

And then Harboro appeared--not in the distance, but close at hand. He was
passing Sylvia's gate. He had a natural taste for geology, it seemed, and
he had chosen this hour to walk out beyond Eagle Pass to examine the rock
formations which had been cast up to the surface of the desert by
prehistoric cataclysms.

He was close enough to Sylvia to touch her when her presence broke down
his abstraction and drew his eyes away from whatever object they had been
observing away on the horizon.

He stopped as if he had been startled. That was a natural result of
Sylvia's appearance here in this withered place. She was so delicately,
fragilely abloom. Her setting should have been some region south of the
Caucasus. Her period should have been during the foundations of mythology.
She would have made you think of Eve.

And because her hand went to her heart, and her lips parted tremulously,
Harboro stopped. It was as if he felt he must make amends. Yet his words
were the inevitable banalities.

"You have a fine view here," he said.

"A fine view!" she echoed, a little incredulously. It was plain that she
did not agree with him. "There is plenty of sun and air," she conceded
after a pause.

He rested a heavy hand on the fence. When Harboro stopped you never had
the feeling that some of his interests had gone on ahead and were
beckoning to him. He was always all there, as if permanently.

He regarded her intently. Her voice had something of the quality of the
_Traeumerei_ in it, and it had affected him like a violin's _vibrato_,
accompanying a death scene--or as a litany might have done, had he been a
religious man.

"I suppose you find it too much the same, one day after another," he
suggested, in response to that mournful quality in her voice. "You live
here, then?"

She was looking across the desert. Whe