There was little talk among the group around the fire.  The three men smoked peacefully.  Katherine and Jack sat close to each other, on the davenport, content to be together.  DeWitt lounged where he could watch Rhoda, as did Billy Porter, the latter hanging on every word and movement of this lovely, fragile being, as if he would carry forever in his heart the memory of her charm.

Rhoda herself watched the fire.  She was tired, tired to the inmost fiber of her being.  The only real desire left her was that she might crawl off somewhere and die in peace.  But these good friends of hers had set their faces against the inevitable and it was only decency to humor them.  Once, quite unconscious that the others were watching her, she lifted her hands and eyed them idly.  They were almost transparent and shook a little.  The group about the fire stirred pityingly.  John and Katherine and Jack remembered those shadowy hands when they had been rosy and full of warmth and tenderness.  Billy Porter leaned across and with his hard brown palms pressed the trembling fingers down into Rhoda’s lap.  She looked up in astonishment.

“Don’t hold ’em so!” said Billy hoarsely.  “I can’t stand to see ’em!”

“They are pretty bad,” said Rhoda, smiling.  It was her rare, slow, unforgetable smile.  Porter swallowed audibly.  Cartwell at the piano drifted from a Mohave lament to La Paloma.

  “The day that I left my home for the rolling sea,
  I said, ‘Mother dear, O pray to thy God for me!’
  But e’er I set sail I went a fond leave to take
  Of Nina, who wept as if her poor heart would break!”

The mellow, haunting melody caught Rhoda’s fancy at once, as Cartwell knew it would.  She turned to the sinewy figure at the piano.  DeWitt was wholesome and strong, but this young Indian seemed vitality itself.

  “Nina, if I should die and o’er ocean’s foam
  Softly at dusk a fair dove should come,
  Open thy window, Nina, for it would be
  My faithful soul come back to thee——­”

Something in Cartwell’s voice stirred Rhoda as had his eyes.  For the first time in months Rhoda felt poignantly that it would be hard to be cut down with all her life unlived.  The mellow voice ceased and Cartwell, rising, lighted a fresh cigarette.

“I am going to get up with the rabbits, tomorrow,” he said, “so I’ll trot to bed now.”

DeWitt, impelled by that curious sense of liking for the young Indian that fought down his aversion, said, “The music was bully, Cartwell!” but Cartwell only smiled as if at the hint of patronage in the voice and strolled to his own room.

Rhoda slept late the following morning.  She had not, in her three nights in the desert country, become accustomed to the silence that is not the least of the desert’s splendors.  It seemed to her that the nameless unknown Mystery toward which her life was drifting was embodied in this infinite silence.  So sleep would not come to her until dawn.  Then the stir of the wind in the trees, the bleat of sheep, the trill of mocking-birds lulled her to sleep.