“Don’t let the ghosts get you, old man,”, said Enoch.  “After all you’ve lived through, that would be too simple.”

Jonas grinned, and followed the Indians out into the darkness.

“Now,” inquired Enoch, “is that tact or superstition?”

“Both, I should say,” replied Diana.  “We’ll have to agree that Na-che and Jonas are doing all they can to make the match.  I gather from what Na-che says that they’re working mostly on love charms for us.”

“More power to ’em,” said Enoch grimly.  “Diana, let’s walk out under the stars for a little while.  The fire dims them.”

They rose, and Enoch put his arm about the girl and said, with a tenderness in his beautiful voice that seemed to Diana a very part of the harmony of the glowing stars: 

“Diana!  Oh, Diana!  Diana!”

She wondered as they moved slowly away from the fire, if Enoch had any conception of the beauty of his voice.  It seemed to her to express the man even more fully than his face.  All the sweetness, all the virility, all the suffering, all the capacity for joy that was written in Enoch’s face was expressed in his voice, with the addition of a melodiousness that only tone could give.  Although she never had heard him make a speech she knew how even his most commonplace sentence must wing home to the very heart of the hearer.

They said less, in this hour alone together, than they said in any evening of their journey.  And yet they both felt as if it was the most nearly perfect of their hours.

Perhaps it was because the sky was more magnificent than it had been before; the stars larger and nearer and the sky more deeply, richly blue.

Perhaps it was because after the dusk and heat of the day, the uproar of the sand and wind, the cool silence was doubly impressive and thrice grateful.

And perhaps it was because of some wordless, intangible reason, that only lovers know, which made Diana seem more beautiful, more pure, her touch more sacred, and Enoch stronger, finer, tenderer than ever before.

At any rate, walking slowly, with their arms about each other, they were deeply happy.

And Enoch said, “Diana, I know now that not one moment of the loneliness and the bitterness of the years, would I part with.  All of it serves to make this moment more perfect.”

And suddenly Diana said, “Enoch, hold me close to you again, here, under the stars, so that I may never again look at them, when I’m alone in the desert, without feeling your dear arms about me, and your dear cheek against mine.”

And when they were back by the fire again, Enoch once more leaned against Diana’s knee and felt the soft touch of her hand on his hair and forehead.

The three magic-makers returned, chanting softly, as magic-makers should.  Faint and far across the desert sounded the intriguing rhythm long before the three dark faces were caught by the firelight.  When they finally appeared, Jonas was bearing an eagle’s feather.