f girlhood. She forgot all the bitterness and the
sorrow of this land of strangers. She Stretched out her arms to
the golden-winged Romance that had taught her the ecstasy of first
love.

"Oh, Guy--my own Guy--come to me!" she said.

It moved then, moved suddenly, even convulsively, as a wounded man
might move. He lifted his head, and looked at her.

Her dream passed like the rending of a veil. His eyes pierced her,
but she had to meet them, lacking power to do otherwise.

So for a space they looked at one another in the moonlight, saying
no word, scarcely so much as breathing.

Then, at last he got to his feet with the heavy movements of a
tired man, stood a while longer looking down at her, finally turned
in utter silence and left her.

When Sylvia slept, many hours later, there came again to her for
the third and last time the awful dream of two horsemen who
galloped towards each other upon the same rocky path. She saw
again the shock of collision and the awful hurtling fall. She went
again down into the stony valley and searched for the man who she
knew was dead. She found him in a deep place that no other living
being had ever entered. He lay with his face upturned to the
moonlight, and his eyes wide and glassy gazing upwards. She drew
near, and stooped to close those eyes; but she could not. For they
gazed straight into her own. They pierced her soul with the mute
reproach of a silence that could never be broken again.

She turned and went away through a devastating loneliness. She
knew now which of the two had galloped free and which had fallen,
and she went as one without hope or comfort, wandering through the
waste places of the earth.

Late in the morning she awoke and looked out upon a world of
dreadful sunshine,--a parched and barren world that panted in vain
for the healing of rain.

"It is a land of blasted hopes," she told herself drearily.
"Everything in it is doomed."

CHAPTER VI

THE PARTING

Sylvia entered the sitting-room that day with the feeling of one
returning after a prolonged absence. She had been almost too tired
to notice her surroundings the previous night upon arrival. Her
limbs felt leaden still, but her brain was alive and throbbing with
a painful intensity.

Mary Ann informed her that the big _baas_ was out on the lands, and
she received the news thankfully. Now was her chance! She took
it, feeling like a traitor.

Once more she went to Burke's