slowly into the desert. It seemed to her that years had passed
since she had seen the moon--a full moon, swinging, at this hour of the
evening, in the eastern sky.

"Come, Sylvia!" It was Harboro's urgent voice again.

"If I only could!" she said, moving a little in token of her discomfort.

"Why not?"

"I mean, if any of us could ever say what it is that has gone wrong.
Everything has gone wrong. From the very beginning. And now you ask me:
'What's gone wrong?' just as you might ask, 'What time is it, Sylvia?' or,
'Who is it coming up the road?' I can't tell you what's gone wrong. If I
talked to you a week--a month--I couldn't tell you half of it. I don't
believe I ever could. I don't believe I know."

These vagaries might have touched Harboro at another time; they might have
alarmed him. But for the moment wrath stirred in him. He arose almost
roughly. "Very well," he said, "I shall go to your father. I shall have
the facts."

This angry reference to her father--or perhaps it was the roughness of his
withdrawal from her--affected her in a new way.

"No, you must not do that!" she cried despairingly, and then the tears
came suddenly--the tears which had stubbornly refused to flow.

"There," he said, instantly tender again, "you'll feel better soon. I
won't be impatient with you."

But Sylvia's tears were only incidental to some lesser fear or grief. They
did not spring from the wrong she had suffered, or from the depths of her
nature, which had been dwarfed and darkened. She listlessly pulled a chair
into a better position and sat down where she need not look at Harboro.
"Give me a little time," she said. "You know women have moods, don't you?"
She tried to speak lightly. "If there is anything I can tell you, I
will--if you'll give me time."

She had no intention of telling Harboro what had happened. The very
thought of such a course was monstrous. Nothing could be undone. She could
only make conditions just a little worse by talking. She realized heavily
that the thing which had happened was not a complete episode in itself; it
was only one chapter in a long story which had its beginnings in the first
days in Eagle Pass, and even further away. Back in the San Antonio days.
She could not give Harboro an intelligent statement of one chapter without
detailing a long, complicated synopsis of the chapters that went before.

To be sure, she did not yet know the man she was dealing with--Harboro.
She was entirely