When they had mounted and he had reined his bay down to the side of her roan, he sat studying her through half-closed, satisfied eyes though he already knew her as the Moslem priest knows the Koran.  While they rode in silence he conned the inventory.  Slim uprightness like the strength of a young poplar; eyes that played the whole color-gamut between violet and slate-gray, as does the Mediterranean under sun and cloud-bank; lips that in repose hinted at melancholy and that broke into magic with a smile.  Then there was the suggestion of a thought-furrow between the brows and a chin delicately chiseled, but resolute and fascinatingly uptilted.

It was a face that triumphed over mere prettiness with hints of challenging qualities; with individuality, with possibilities of purpose, with glints of merry humor and unspoken sadness; with deep-sleeping potentiality for passion; with a hundred charming whimsicalities.

The eyes were just now fixed on the burning beauty of the sunset and the thought-furrow was delicately accentuated.  She drew a long, deep breath and, letting the reins drop, stretched out both arms toward the splendor of the sky-line.

“It is so beautiful—­so beautiful!” she cried, with the rapture of a child, “and it all spells Freedom.  I should like to be the freest thing that has life under heaven.  What is the freest thing in the world?”

She turned her face on him with the question, and her eyes widened after a way they had until they seemed to be searching far out in the fields of untalked-of things, and seeing there something that clouded them with disquietude.

“I should like to be a man,” she went on, “a man and a hobo.”  The furrow vanished and the eyes suddenly went dancing.  “That is what I should like to be—­a hobo with a tomato-can and a fire beside the railroad-track.”

The man said nothing, and she looked up to encounter a steady gaze from eyes somewhat puzzled.

His pupils held a note of pained seriousness, and her voice became responsively vibrant as she leaned forward with answering gravity in her own.

“What is it?” she questioned.  “You are troubled.”

He looked away beyond her to the pine-topped hills, which seemed to be marching with lances and ragged pennants, against the orange field of the sky.  Then his glance came again to her face.

“They call me the Shadow,” he said slowly.  “You know whose shadow that means.  These weeks have made us comrades, and I am jealous because you are the sum of two girls, and I know only one of them.  I am jealous of the other girl at home in Europe.  I am jealous that I don’t know why you, who are seemingly subject only to your own fancy, should crave the freedom of the hobo by the railroad track.”

She bent forward to adjust a twisted martingale, and for a moment her face was averted.  In her hidden eyes at that moment, there was deep suffering, but when she straightened up she was smiling.