As they walked down the canon she looked at him furtively.  The men of her race were almost all tall and finely-proportioned, but they did not suggest strength as this man did.  And his face,—­it was so grimly determined at times that she shrank from it, then drew near, fascinated.  It had no beauty at all—­according to Californian standards; she could not know that it represented all that intellect, refinement and civilization, generally, would do for the human race for a century to come,—­but it had a subtle power, an absolute audacity, an almost contemptuous fearlessness in its bold, fine outline, a dominating intelligence in the keen deeply-set eyes, and a hint of weakness, where and what she could not determine, that mystified and magnetized her.

“I know you a little better,” she said, “just a little,—­enough to make my curiosity ache and jump.  At the same time, I know now what I did not before,—­that I might climb and mine and study and watch, and you would always be beyond me.  There is something subtle and evasive about you—­something I seem to be close to always, yet never can see or grasp.”

“It is merely the barrier of sex.  A man can know a woman fairly well, because her life, consequently the interests which mould her mind and conceive her thoughts, are more or less simple.  A man’s life is so complex, his nature so inevitably the sum and work of it of it lies so far outside of woman’s sphere, his mind spiked with a thousand magnets, each pointing to a different possibility,—­that she would need divine wisdom to comprehend him in his entirety, even if he made her a diagram of every cell in his brain,—­which he never would, out of consideration for both her and his own vanity.  But within certain restrictions there can be a magnificent sense of comradeship.”

“But a woman, I think, would never be happy with that something in the man always beyond her grasp,—­that something which she could be nothing to.  She would be more jealous of that independence of her in man than of another woman.”

“That was pure insight,” he said.  “You could not know that.”

“No,” she said, “I had not thought of it before.”

I had made a martyr of myself on a three-cornered stone at the entrance of the canon, waiting to duena them out.  “Never will I do this again!” I exclaimed, with that virtue born of discomfort, as they came in sight.

“My dearest Eustaquia,” said Diego, kissing my hand gallantly, “thou hast given me pleasure so often, most charming and clever of women, thou hast but added one new art to thy overflowing store.”

We mounted almost immediately upon returning, and I was alone with Chonita for a moment.  “Do you realize that you are playing with fire?” I said, warningly.  “Estenega is a dangerous man; the most successful man with women I have ever known.”

“I do not deny his power,” she said.  “But I am safe, for the many reasons thou knowest of.  And, being safe, why should I deny myself the pleasure of talking to him?  I shall never meet his like again.  Let me live for a little while.”