t would have been easy to read this pursuing glance,
the look of the hunter on his quarry. David saw it and rose to his
knees. A rifle lay within arm's reach, and for one furious moment he
felt an impulse to snatch it and kill the man. But a rush of
inhibiting instinct checked him. Had death or violence menaced her he
could have done it, but without the incentive of the immediate horror
he could never rise so far beyond himself.

Susan climbed the rock's side to a plateau on its western face. The
sun beat on her like a furnace mouth. Here and there black filigrees
of shade shrank to the bases of splintered ledges. Below the plain lay
outflung in the stupor of midday. On its verge the mountains
stretched, a bright blue, shadowless film. A mirage trembled to the
south, a glassy vision, crystal clear amid the chalky streakings and
the rings of parched and blanching sinks. Across the prospect the
faint, unfamiliar mist hung as if, in the torrid temperature, the earth
was steaming.

She sat down on a shelf of rock not feeling the burning sunshine or the
heat that the baked ledges threw back upon her. The life within her
was so intense that no impressions from the outside could enter, even
her eyes took in no image of the prospect they dwelt on. Courant's
kiss had brought her to a place toward which, she now realized, she had
been moving for a long time, advancing upon it, unknowing, but impelled
like a somnambulist willed toward a given goal. What was to happen she
did not know. She felt a dread so heavy that it crushed all else from
her mind. They had reached a crisis where everything had stopped, a
dark and baleful focus to which all that had gone before had been
slowly converging. The whole journey had been leading to this climax
of suspended breath and fearful, inner waiting.

She heard the scraping of ascending feet, and when she saw David stared
at him, her eyes unblinking in stony expectancy. He came and stood
before her, and she knew that at last he had guessed, and felt no fear,
no resistance against the explanation that must come. He suddenly had
lost all significance, was hardly a human organism, or if a human
organism, one that had no relation to her. Neither spoke for some
minutes. He was afraid, and she waited, knowing what he was going to
say, wishing it was said, and the hampering persistence of his claim
was ended.

At length he said tremulously:

"Susan, I saw you last night. What