Her gaze, wandering always out over the tremendous sweep of plateau which from that point looked illimitable as the ocean, settled upon a whirlwind that displayed method and a slow sedateness not at all in keeping with the erratic gyrations of those gone before.  Watching it wistfully with a half-formed hope that it might not be just a dry-weather whirlwind, her droning voice trailed off into silence.  A faint beating in her throat betrayed what it was she half hoped.  She was so desperately lonesome!

Pat tilted his head and looked up at her and licked her hand until she drew it away impatiently.

“Good gracious, Pat!  Do you want to plaster me with germs?” she reproved.  And Pat dropped his head down upon his paws and eyed her furtively from under his brown lids, waiting for her to repent her harshness and smooth his head caressingly, as was her wont.

But Helen May was watching that slow-moving column of dust, just as she had watched the cloud which had heralded the coming into her life of Holman Sommers.  It might be—­but it couldn’t, for this was away off the road.  No one would be cutting straight across that hummocky flat, unless—­

From the desert I come to thee,
On my Arab shod with fire—­

“Oh, I’m getting absolutely mushy!” she muttered angrily.  “If I’ve reached the point where I can’t see a spot of dust without getting heart-failure over it, why it’s time I was shut up somewhere.  What are you lolling around me for, Pat?  Go on and tend to your goats, why don’t you?  And do get off my skirt!”

Pat sprang up as though she had struck him; gave her an injured glance that was perfectly maddening to Helen May, whose conscience was sufficient punishment, and went slinking off down the slope.  Half-way to the band he stopped and sat down on his haunches in the hot sun, as dejected a dog as ever was made to suffer because his mistress was displeased with herself.

Helen May sat there scowling out across the wide spaces, while romance and adventure, and something more, rode steadily nearer, heralded by the small gray cloud.  When she was sure that a horseman was coming, she perversely removed herself to another spot where she would not be seen.  And there she sat, out of sight from below and thus fancying herself undiscovered, refusing so much as a sly glance around her granite shield.

For if there was anything which Helen May hated more than another it was the possibility of being thought cheaply sentimental, mushy, as the present generation vividly puts it.  Also she was trying to break herself of humming that old desert love-song all the while.  Vic was beginning to “kid” her unmercifully about it, for one thing.  To think that she should sing it without thinking a word about it, just because she happened to see a little dust!  She would not look.  She would not!