She had at first no control over it, and a thousand thronging sensations came and went and recurred with little logical relation.  There were the roar of the train; the feeling of being lost; the sound of pounding hoofs; a picture of her brother’s face as she had last seen it five years before; a long, dim line of lights; the jingle of silver spurs; night, wind, darkness, stars.  Then the gloomy station, the shadowy blanketed Mexican, the empty room, the dim lights across the square, the tramp of the dancers and vacant laughs and discordant music, the door flung wide and the entrance of the cowboy.  She did not recall how he had looked or what he had done.  And the next instant she saw him cool, smiling, devilish—­saw him in violence; the next his bigness, his apparel, his physical being were vague as outlines in a dream.  The white face of the padre flashed along in the train of thought, and it brought the same dull, half-blind, indefinable state of mind subsequent to that last nerve-breaking pistol-shot.  That passed, and then clear and vivid rose memories of the rest that had happened—­strange voices betraying fury of men, a deadened report, a moan of mortal pain, a woman’s poignant cry.  And Madeline saw the girl’s great tragic eyes and the wild flight of the big horse into the blackness, and the dark, stalking figure of the silent cowboy, and the white stars that seemed to look down remorselessly.

This tide of memory rolled over Madeline again and again, and gradually lost its power and faded.  All distress left her, and she felt herself drifting.  How black the room was—­as black with her eyes open as it was when they were shut!  And the silence—­it was like a cloak.  There was absolutely no sound.  She was in another world from that which she knew.  She thought of this fair-haired Florence and of Alfred; and, wondering about them, she dropped to sleep.

When she awakened the room was bright with sunlight.  A cool wind blowing across the bed caused her to put her hands under the blanket.  She was lazily and dreamily contemplating the mud walls of this little room when she remembered where she was and how she had come there.

How great a shock she had been subjected to was manifest in a sensation of disgust that overwhelmed her.  She even shut her eyes to try and blot out the recollection.  She felt that she had been contaminated.

Presently Madeline Hammond again awoke to the fact she had learned the preceding night—­that there were emotions to which she had heretofore been a stranger.  She did not try to analyze them, but she exercised her self-control to such good purpose that by the time she had dressed she was outwardly her usual self.  She scarcely remembered when she had found it necessary to control her emotions.  There had been no trouble, no excitement, no unpleasantness in her life.  It had been ordered for her—­ tranquil, luxurious, brilliant, varied, yet always the same.