nd restful things. That's all. Your waking will be only a
sentimental and perfumed regret--a sachet-powder sorrow."

"You're bitter."

"I don't want him hurt," protested the other. "Why did you come here?
What should a girl like you, feverish and sensation-loving and
artificial, see in a boy like Ban to charm you?"

"Ah, don't you understand? It's just because my world has been too
dressed up and painted and powdered that I feel the charm of--of--well,
of ease of existence. He's as easy as an animal. There's something about
him--you must have felt it--sort of impassioned sense of the gladness of
life; when he has those accesses he's like a young god, or a faun. But
he doesn't know his own power. At those times he might do anything."

She shivered a little and her lids drooped over the luster of her
dreaming eyes.

"And you want to tempt him out of this to a world where he would be a
wretched misfit," accused the older woman.

"Do I? No; I think I don't. I think I'd rather hold him in my mind as he
is here: a happy eremite; no, a restrained pagan. Oh, it's foolish to
seek definitions for him. He isn't definable. He's Ban...."

"And when you get back into the world, what will you do, I wonder?"

"I won't send for him, if that's what you mean."

"But what _will_ you do, I wonder?"

"I wonder," repeated Io somberly.

CHAPTER XIII

Silently they rode through the stir and thresh of the night, the two
women and the man. For guidance along the woods trail they must trust to
the finer sense of their horses whose heads they could not see in the
closed-in murk. A desultory spray fell upon them as the wind wrenched at
the boughs overhead, but the rain had ceased. Infinitely high,
infinitely potent sounded the imminent tumult of the invisible Powers of
the night, on whose sufferance they moved, tiny, obscure, and unharmed.
It filled all the distances.

Debouching upon the open desert, they found their range of vision
slightly expanded. They could dimly perceive each other. The horses drew
closer together. With his flash covered by his poncho, Banneker
consulted a compass and altered their course, for he wished to give the
station, to which Gardner might have returned, a wide berth. Io moved up
abreast of him as he stood, studying the needle. Had he turned the light
upward he would have seen that she was smiling. Whether he would have
interpreted that smile, whether, indeed, she could have interpreted it
herse