added the word mysterious, and she also added two
lines of the song because they fitted exactly her conception of him as
she knew him. The lines were these:

From the desert I come to thee,
On my Arab shod with fire.

This, in spite of the fact that Rabbit had none of the fiery traits of an
Arabian steed; nor could he by any stretch of the imagination be accused
of being shod with fire, he who planted his hoofs so sedately! Shod with
velvet would have come nearer describing him.

So Helen May, who was something of a dreamer when Life let her alone long
enough, rode home through the moonlight and wove cloth-of-gold from the
magic of the night, and with the fairy fabric she clothed Starr--who was,
as we know, just an ordinary human being--so that he walked before her,
not as a plain, ungrammatical, sometimes profane young man who was
helping her home with her goats, but a mysterious, romantic figure
evolved somehow out of the vastness in which she lived; who would
presently recede again into the mysterious wild whence he had come.

It was foolish. She knew that it was foolish. But she had been living
rather harshly and rather materially for some time, and she hungered for
the romance of youth. Starr was the only person who had come to her
untagged by the sordid, everyday petty details of life. It did not hurt
him to be idealized, but it might have hurt Helen May a little to know
that he was pondering so earthly a subject as a big, black automobile
careering without lights across the desert and carrying four men who
looked like Mexicans.

CHAPTER EIGHT

HOLMAN SOMMEKS, SCIENTIST

Helen May, under a last year's parasol of pink silk from which the sun
had drawn much of its pinkness and the wind and dust its freshness, sat
beside the road with her back against the post that held the macaroni
box, and waited for the stage. Her face did not need the pink light of
the parasol, for it was red enough after that broiling walk of yesterday.
The desert did not look so romantic by the garish light of midday, but
she stared out over it and saw, as with eyes newly opened to
appreciation, that there was a certain charm even in its garishness. She
had lost a good deal of moodiness and a good deal of discontent,
somewhere along the moonlight trail of last night, and she hummed a tune
while she waited. No need to tell you that it was: "_Till the sun grows
cold, till the stars are old_--" No need to tell you, either, of whom