The only stage passenger besides Miss Carmichael was a fat lady, whose entire luggage seemed to consist of luncheon—­pasteboard boxes of sandwiches, baskets of fruit, napkins of cake.  These she began to dispose of, before the stage had fairly started, with an industry almost automatic, continuing faithful to her post as long as the supplies lasted.  Then she dozed, sleeping the sleep of the just and those who keep their mouths open.  From time to time the stage-driver invoked his team in cabalistic words, and each time the horses toiled forward with fresh energy; but progress became a mockery in that ocean of space, their driving seemed as futile as the sport of children who crack a whip and play at stage-coach with a couple of chairs; the mountains still mocked in the distance.

A flat, unbroken sweep of country, a tangle of straggling sage-brush, a glimpse of foot-hills in the distance, was the outlook mile after mile.  The day grew pitilessly hot.  Clouds of alkaline dust swept aimlessly over the desert or whirled into spirals till lost in space.  From horizon to horizon the sky was one cloudless span of blue that paled as it dipped earthward.  Mary Carmichael dozed and wakened, but the prospect was always the same—­the red stage crawling over the wilderness, making no evident progress, and always the sun, the sage-brush, and the silence.

It was all so overwhelmingly different from the peaceful atmosphere of things at home.  The mellow Virginia country, with its winding, red roads, wealth of woodland, and its grave old houses that were the more haughtily aloof for the poverty that gnawed at their vitals.  This wilderness was so gaunt, so parched; she closed her eyes and thought of a bit of landscape at home.  A young forest of silver beeches growing straight and fine as the threads on a loom; and through the gray perspective of their satin-smooth trunks you caught the white gleam of a fairy cascade as it tumbled over the moss-grown stones to the brook below.  It was like a bit from a Japanese garden in its delicate artificiality.

And harder to leave than these cherished bits of landscape had been the old house Runnymede, that always seemed dozing in the peaceful comatose of senility.  It was beyond the worry of debt; the succession of mortgages that sapped its vitality and wrote anxious lines on the faces of Aunt Adelaide and Aunt Martha was nothing to the old house.  Had it not sheltered Carmichaels for over a century?—­it had faith in the name.  But Mary could never remember when the need of money to pay the mortgage had not invaded the gentle routine of their home-life, robbing the sangaree of its delicate flavor in the long, sleepy summer afternoons, invading the very dining-room, an unwelcome guest at the old mahogany table, prompting Aunt Adelaide to cast anxious glances at the worn silver—­would it go to pay that blood-sucking mortgage next?