“May I bring my things over and eat with you?” he asked when he stood looking down on her and she had lifted her eyes curiously to his.  “If you’ve come to stay you can’t go on forever not knowing anybody here, you know.  Since you’ve got to know us sooner or later why not begin to get acquainted?  Here and now and with me?  I’m Roderick Norton.”

One must have had far less discernment than she not to have felt instinctively that the great bulk of human conventions would shrivel and vanish before they could come this far across the desert lands.  Besides, the man standing over her looked straight and honestly into her eyes and for a little she glimpsed again the youth of him veiled by the sternness his life had set into his soul and upon his face.

“It is kind of you to have pity upon me in my isolation,” she answered lightly and without hesitation.  “And, to tell the truth, I never was so terribly lonesome in all my life.”

He made two trips back and forth to bring his plate and coffee cup and auxiliary sauce dishes and plated silver, while she wondered idly that he did not instruct the Indian girl to perform the service for him.  Even then she half formulated the thought that it was much more natural for this man to do for himself what he wanted than for him to sit down to be waited upon.  A small matter, no doubt; but then mountains are made up of small particles and character of just such small characteristics as this.

During the half hour which they spent together over their meal they got to know each other rather better than chance acquaintances are likely to do in so brief a time.  For from the moment of Norton’s coming to her table the bars were down between them.  She was plainly eager to supplement Ignacio Chavez’s information of “la gente” of San Juan and its surrounding country, evincing a curiosity which he readily understood to be based upon the necessities of her profession.  In return for all that he told her she sketchily spoke of her own plans, very vague plans, to be sure, she admitted with one of her quick, gay smiles.  She had come prepared to accept what she found, she was playing no game of hide-and-seek with her destiny, but had wandered thus far from the former limits of her existence to meet life half way, hoping to do good for others, a little imperiously determined to achieve her own measure of success and happiness.

From the beginning each was ready, perhaps more than ready, to like the other.  Her eyes, whether they smiled or grew suddenly grave, pleased him; always were they fearless.  He sensed that beneath the external soft beauty of a very lovely young woman there was a spirit of hardihood in every sense worthy of the success which she had planned bare-handed to make for herself, and in the man’s estimation no quality stood higher than a superb independence.  On her part, there was first a definite surprise, then a glow of satisfaction that in this virile arm