ctly fascinating in silken hose and
dainty slippers. Her khaki skirt, of the divided kind much affected by
tourists, had lost two big, pearl buttons, and she had no others to
replace them. Her shirt-waist had its collar turned inside for coolness,
and the hollow of her neck was sun-blistered and beginning to peel. Also
her nose and her neck at the sides were showing a disposition to grow new
skin for old. So much had the desert sun done for her.

But there was something else which the desert had done, something which
Helen May did not fully realize. It had put a clear, steady look into her
eyes in place of the glassy shine of fever. It was beginning to fill out
that hollow in her neck, so that it no longer showed the angular ends of
her collar bones. It had put a resilient quality into her walk, firmness
into the poise of her head. It had made it physically possible, for
instance, for Helen May to trudge out into the wild to hunt nine goats
that had strayed from the main band.

Though she did not know it, a certain dream of Peter's had very nearly
come true. For here were the vast plains, unpeopled, pure, immutable in
their magnificent calm. At night the stars seemed to come down and hang
just over Helen May's head. There was the little cottage of which Peter
had dreamed--only Helen May called it a miserable little shack--hunched
against a hill; sometimes a light winked through the window at the stars;
sometimes Helen May was startled at the nearness and the shrill
insistence of the coyotes. Here as Peter had dreamed so longingly and so
hopelessly, were distance and quiet and calm. And here was Helen May
coming through the sunlight--Peter never dreamed how hot it would
be!--with her deep-gold hair tousled in the wind and with the little red
spots gone from her cheeks and with health in her eyes that were the
color of ripe chestnuts. When her skin had adjusted itself to the rigors
of the climate, she would no doubt have freckles on her nose, just as
Peter had dreamed she might have. And if she were walking, instead of
riding the gentle-eyed pony which Peter had pictured, that was not
Peter's fault, nor the fault of the dream. There was no laugh on her
lips, however. Dreams are always pulling a veil of idealism over the face
of reality, and so Helen May's face was not happy, as Peter had dreamed
it might be, but petulant and grimly determined; her ripe-red lips were
moving in anathemas directed at nine detested goats.