wall, the blue of a cloudless October sky.  The team they were driving, a mouse-coloured broncho and a mate a shade darker, were restless after three days of enforced inactivity and tugged at the bit mightily.  Though the day was perfectly still, the canvas curtains of the old surrey flapped lazily in a breeze born of the pace alone.  The harness on the ponies shuffled and creaked with every move.  Though the bolts of the ancient vehicle had been carefully tightened, it nevertheless groaned at intervals with the motion; mysteriously, like the unconscious sigh of the aged, apparently without reason.  Beneath the wheels the frost-dried grass rattled continuously, monotonously; but save this last there was no other sound.  Since the two humans had left the limits of the tiny town there had been no other sound.  Now and then the girl had glanced behind, instinctively, almost fearfully; but not once had the man followed her example, had he stirred in his place.  Swiftly, silently, he was leaving civilisation behind him; by the scarce visible landmarks he alone distinguished was returning to his own, to the wild that lay in the distance beyond.

Thus westward, direct as a tight cord, on and on they went; and back of them gradually, all but unconsciously, the low-built terminus grew dimmer and dimmer, vanished detail by detail as completely as though it had never been.  Last of all to disappear, already a mere black dot against the blue, was the water tank beside the station.  For three miles, four, it held its place; then, as, with the old unconscious motion the girl turned to look back, she searched for it in vain.  Behind them as before, unbroken, limiting, only the brown plain and the blue surrounding wall met her gaze.  At last, there in the solitude, there with no observer save nature and nature’s God, she and the other were alone.

As the first man and the first woman were alone they were alone.  From horizon to horizon was not a sign of human handiwork, not a suggestion of human presence.  They might live or die, or laugh or weep, or love or hate—­and none of their kind would be the wiser.  All her life that she could remember the girl had lived so, all her life she had but to lift her eyes above her feet to gaze into the infinite; yet in the irony of fate never until this moment, the moment when of all she should have been the happiest, did the immensity of this solitude appeal to her so, did appreciation of the terrible, haunting loneliness it concealed touch her with its grip.  Care free, thoughtless, never until the whirl of the last fortnight had the future, her future, appealed to her as something which she herself must shape or alter.  Heretofore it had been a thing taken for granted, preordained as the alternate coming of light and of darkness.  But in that intervening time, short as it was, she had awakened.  Rude as had been the circumstances that had aroused her, they had nevertheless been effective.  Without volition upon her part the panorama of another life