“‘I only died last night!’” she repeated the line, slowly, significantly.  In her questioning she forgot the night, the desolation, the presence of the man.  Had she died last night?  Had youth, the joy of living, her infinite capacity for love, had they died when Peter, with the ugly haste of the man without a nice sense of the time that should elapse between the old and the new love, had spurred away cheerfully at the beck of another woman?  And now the desert, this earth-mother as she called it, in the Indian way, had given him back to her, thrown them together as driftwood in the still ocean of space.  She drew a long breath, the breath of one waking from an anguished dream.  A wild, unreasoning gladness woke in her heart, the joy of living swept her back again to life.  She had not died last night, she was riding through the wilderness with Peter.

“Look!” she whispered.  The sky had lost its forbidding blackness.  The sharp notches of the mountains, faintly outlined in white, undulated through an eternity of space.  Venus hung in the west, burning softly as a shaded lamp.  The trail they climbed seemed to end in her pale yellow light.

Peter had saved the situation, but the wild beauty of the night stirred in him that gift of silvery speech that was ever his tribute to the sex, rather than the woman.  He bent towards Judith.  A loosened strand of her hair blew across his cheek.  The breakneck ride to Kitty was already the madness of a dead and gone incarnation.  He pointed to the pale star, and told her it was the omen of their destiny; the formless blackness through which they had groped was the way of life, but for such as were not condemned to eternal darkness Venus held high her lamp and they scaled the heights.

And Judith, listening, found her heart a battle-field of love and hate.  “Were women dogs, that men should play with them in idle moods, caress them, and fling them out for other toys?” she demanded of herself, even while the tones of his voice melted her innermost being to thankfulness for this hour that he was wholly hers.

Gayly, with ready turns of speech and snatches of song, trolled in his musical barytone, Peter rode through the night, even as he rode through life, a Sir Knight of the Joyous Heart, unbrushed by the wing of sorrow, loving his pale griefs for the values they gave the picture.  And Judith understood by reason of that exquisite perception that was hers in all matters pertaining to him, and, knowing, only loved the more.

Down the valley came the sharp yelp of a coyote, and in a moment the towering crags had taken it up, the echo repeating it and giving it back to the valley, where the coyote barked again at the shadow of his voice.  The night was full of the eerie laughter.  Peter put a restraining hand on Dolly’s bridle, and, waiting for the coyote to stop, called Judith’s name, and all the mountains made music of it.  The echo sang the old Hebrew name as if it had been