til last night! Until after our meeting on
the other side of the pass! It is strange! strange!" he repeated in the
insistence of wonder.

He saw the lashes part a little, then quiver and close as she lifted
her gaze from the horizon rim to the vortex of the sun. Then she
smiled wearily.

"He likes a joke," she said. "Probably he enjoyed his knowledge of your
secret and wanted to see if I would guess the truth before you were
through playing your part."

"But the part was not a part!" he said, with the emphasis of fire
creeping along a fuse. "It was real. I do not want to leave Little
Rivers!"

"Not in your present enthusiasm," she returned with a warning inflection
of literalness, when he would have welcomed satire, anger, or any
reprisal of words as something live and warm; something on which his mind
could lay definite hold.

In her impersonal calm she was subjecting him to an exquisite torture. He
was a man flayed past all endurance, flayed by a love that fed on the
revelation of a mystery in her being superbly in control. The riot of all
the colors of the sky spoke from his eyes as he sprang to his feet. He
became as intense as in the supreme moment in the _arroyo_; as reckless
as when he walked across the store toward a gun-muzzle. Only hers were
this time the set, still features. His were lighted with all the strength
of him and all the faith of him.

"A part!" he cried. "Yes, a part--a sovereign and true part which I shall
ever play! I was going that day we first met, going before the legate of
the millions came to me. Why did I stay? Because I could not go when I
saw that you wanted to turn me out of the garden!"

His quivering words were spoken to a profile of bronze, over which
flickered a smile as she answered with a prompting and disinterested
analysis.

"You said it was to make callouses on your hands. But that must have been
persiflage. The truth is that you imagined a challenger. You wanted to
win a victory!" she answered.

"It was for you that I calloused my hands!"

"Time will make them soft!"

She was half teasing now, but teasing through the visor, not over the
wall.

"And if I sought victory I saw that I was being beaten while I made a
profession of you, not of gardening! Yes, of you! I could confess it to
all the world and its ridicule!"

"Jack, you are dramatic!"

If she would only once look at him! If he could only speak into her eyes!
If her breaths did not come and go so regu