ress.

"Don't go. Don't leave me this way. I can't believe it. I can't
stand it. If I hadn't grown into thinking you were going to be my wife
maybe I could. But it's just unbearable when I'd got used to looking
upon you as mine, almost as good as married to me. You can't do it.
You can't make me suffer this way."

His complete abandonment filled her with pain, the first relenting she
had had. She could not look at him and longed to escape. She tried to
draw her dress from his hands, saying:

"Oh, David, don't say any more. There's no good. It's over. It's
ended. I can't help it. It's something stronger than I am."

He saw the repugnance in her face and loosened his hold, dropping back
from her.

"It's the end of my life," he said in a muffled voice.

"I feel as if it was the end of the world," she answered, and going to
the pathway disappeared over its edge.

She walked back skirting the rock's bulk till she found a break in its
side, a small gorge shadowed by high walls. The cleft penetrated deep,
its mouth open to the sky, its apex a chamber over which the cloven
walls slanted like hands with finger tips touching in prayer. It was
dark in this interior space, the floor mottled with gleaming sun-spots.
Across the wider opening, unroofed to the pale blue of the zenith, the
first slow shade was stretching, a creeping gray coolness, encroaching
on the burning ground. Here she threw herself down, looking out
through the entrance at the desert shimmering through the heat haze.
The mist wreaths were dissolving, every line and color glassily clear.
Her eyes rested vacantly on it, her body inert, her heart as heavy as a
stone.

David made no movement to follow her. He had clung to his hope with
the desperation of a weak nature, but it was ended now. No
interference, no miracle, could restore her to him. He saw--he had to
see--that she was lost to him as completely as if death had claimed
her. More completely, for death would have made her a stranger. Now
it was the Susan he had loved who had looked at him with eyes not even
indifferent but charged with a hard hostility. She was the same and
yet how different! Hopeless!--Hopeless! He wondered if the word had
ever before voiced so abject a despair.

He turned to the back of the plateau and saw the faint semblance of a
path leading upward to higher levels, a trail worn by the feet of other
emigrants who had climbed to scan with longing eyes the