How superb she was, he said to himself—­how splendid was her acting!  He could almost forgive himself for having played the fool.  His helplessness, his defenselessness had been warranted.  But—­her smile could befuddle him no more.  He took off his hat, with a certain cold elegance of grace.  His face still wore that chiseled appearance of stone-like hardness.

“Oh!” she cried, in her irrepressible happiness of heart.  “You’re home!  You’re safe!  I’m glad!”

It was nothing, her cry that he was safe.  She had worried only for the desert’s customary perils, but this he could not know.  He thought she referred to a possible meeting with Barger.  He was almost swept from his balance by her look, for a bright bit of moisture had sprung in her eyes and her smile took on a tenderness that all but conquered him anew.

“I delivered your letter in Starlight,” he said.  “I return your brother’s reply.”

He had taken the letter from his pocket.  He held it forth.

She took it.  If memories of Glen started rushingly upon her, they were halted by something she felt in the air, something in the cold, set speech of the man she loved as never she had thought to love a creature of the earth.  She made no reply, but stood looking peculiarly upon him, a question written plainly in her glance.

“If there is nothing more,” he added, “permit me to wish you good-day.”  He swept off his hat as he had before, turned promptly on his heel, and departed the scene forthwith.

She tried to cry out, to ask him what it meant, but the thing had come like a blow.  It had not been what he had said, so much as the manner of its saying—­not so much what she had heard as what her heart had felt.  A deluge of ice water, suddenly thrown upon her, could scarcely have chilled or shocked her more than the coldness that had bristled from his being.

Wholly at a loss to understand, she leaned in sudden weakness against the frame of the door, and watched him disappearing.  Her smile was gone.  In its place a dumb, white look of pain and bewilderment had frozen on her face.  Had not that something, akin to anger, which her nature had felt to be emanating from him remained so potently to oppress her, she could almost have thought the thing a joke—­some freakish mood of playfulness after all the other moods he had shown.  But no such thought was possible.  The glitter in his eyes had been unmistakable.  Then, what could it mean?

She almost cried, as she stood there and saw him vanish.  She had counted so much upon this moment.  She had prayed for his coming safely back from the desert.  She had so utterly unbound the fetters from her love.  Confession of it all had been ready in her heart, her eyes, and on her lips.  Reaction smote her a dulling blow.  Her whole impulsive nature crept back upon itself, abashed—­like something discarded, flung at her feet ingloriously.