do except this, this riding through the night—­absolutely nothing.  Once he had guided her into safety all was done,—­done forever; there remained to him no other hope, ambition, purpose, in all this world.  The desert about them typified that forthcoming existence—­barren, devoid of life, dull, and dead.  He set his teeth savagely to keep back the moan of despair that rose to his lips, half lifting himself in the stirrups to glance back toward her.

If she perceived anything there was not the slightest reflection of it within her eyes.  Lustreless, undeviating, they were staring directly ahead into the gloom, her face white and almost devoid of expression.  The sight of it turned him cold and sick, his unoccupied hand gripping the saddle-pommel as though he would crush the leather.  Yet he did not speak, for there was nothing to say.  Between these two was a fact, grim, awful, unchangeable.  Fronting it, words were meaningless, pitiable.

He had never before known that she could ride, but he knew it now.  His eye noted the security of her seat in the saddle, the easy swaying of her slender form to the motion of the pony, in apparent unconsciousness of the hard travelling or the rapidity of their progress.  She had drawn back the long tresses of her hair and fastened them in place by some process of mystery, so that now her face was revealed unshadowed, clearly defined in the starlight.  Dazed, expressionless, as it appeared, looking strangely deathlike in that faint radiance, he loved it, his moistened eyes fondly tracing every exposed lineament.  God! but this fair woman was all the world to him!  In spite of everything, his heart went forth to her unchanged.  It was Fate, not lack of love or loyalty, that now set them apart, that had made of their future a path of bitterness.  In his groping mind he rebelled against it, vainly searching for some way out, urging blindly that love could even blot out this thing in time, could erase the crime, leaving them as though it had never been.  Yet he knew better.  Once she spoke out of the haunting silence, her voice sounding strange, her eyes still fixed in that same vacant stare ahead into the gloom.

“Isn’t this Mercedes’ pony?  I—­I thought she rode away on him herself?”

With the words the recollection recurred to him that she did not yet know about that other tragedy.  It was a hard task, but he met it bravely.  Quietly as he might, he told the sad story in so far as he understood it—­the love, the sacrifice, the suffering.  As she listened her head drooped ever lower, and he saw the glitter of tears falling unchecked.  He was glad she could cry; it was better than that dull, dead stare.  As he made an end, picturing the sorrowing Stutter kneeling in his silent watch at the bedside, she looked gravely across to him, the moisture clinging to the long lashes.

“It was better so—­far better.  I know how she felt, for she has told me.  God was merciful to her;” the soft voice broke into a sob; “for me, there is no mercy.”