She realized the deepening dusk only when Starr’s form grew vague and she could no longer see the prints his boots made.  They were nearing the brown, lumpy ridge which hid Sunlight Basin from the plain, but Helen May was not particularly eager to reach it.  For the first time she forgot the gnawing heart-hunger of homesickness, and was content with her present surroundings; content even with the goats that trotted submisively ahead of Starr.

When a soft radiance drifted into the darkness and made it a luminous, thin veil, Helen May gave a little cry and looked back.  Since her hands moved with the swing of her shoulders, Rabbit turned sharply and faced the way she was looking, startled, displeased, but obedient.  Starr stopped abruptly and turned back, coming close up beside her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked in an undertone.  “See anything?”

“The moon,” Helen May gave a hushed little laugh.  “I’d forgotten—­forgotten I was alive, almost.  I was just soaking in the beauty of it through every pore.  And then it got dark so I couldn’t see your footprints any more, and then such a queer, beautiful look came on everything.  I turned to look, and this little automatic pony turned to look, too.  But—­isn’t it wonderful?  Everything, I mean.  Just everything—­the whole world and the stars and the sky—­”

Starr lifted an arm and laid it over Rabbit’s neck, fingering the silver-white mane absently.  It brought him quite close to Helen May, so that she could have put her hand on his shoulder.

“Yes.  It’s wonderful—­when it ain’t terrible,” he said, his voice low.

After a silent minute she answered him, in the hushed tone that seemed most in harmony with the tremendous sweep of sky and that great stretch of plain and bare mountain.  “I see what you mean.  It is terrible even when it’s most wonderful.  But one little human alone with it would be—­”

“Sh-sh.” he whispered.  “Listen a minute.  Did you ever hear a big silence like this?”

“No,” she breathed eagerly.  “Sh-sh—­”

At first there was nothing save the whisper of a breeze that stirred the greasewood and then was still.  Full in their faces the moon swung clear of the mountains behind San Bonito and hung there, a luminous yellow ball in the deep, star-sprinkled purple.  Across the desert it flung a faint, straight pathway in the sand.  Rabbit gave a long sigh, turned his head to look back at his master, and then stood motionless again.  Far on a hilltop a coyote pointed his nose to the moon and yap-yap-yapped, with a shrill, long-drawn tremolo wail that made the girl catch her breath.  Behind them the nine goats moved closer together and huddled afraid beside a clump of bushes.  The little breeze whispered again.  A night bird called in a hurried, frightened way, and upon the last notes came the eerie cry of a little night owl.

The girl’s face was uplifted, delicately lighted by the moon.  Her eyes shone dark with those fluttering, sweet wraiths of thoughts which we may not prison in speech, which words only deaden and crush into vapid sentimentalism.  Life, held in a great unutterable calm, seemed to lie out there in the radiant, vague distance, asleep and smiling cryptically while it slept.