“For a professedly shy person, you certainly take a rather intimate tone.”

“Oh, I’m shy only under the baleful influence of the feminine eye.  Besides, you set the note of intimacy when you analyzed my personal appearance.  And finally, I have a warm regard for young Raimonda.”

“So have I,” she returned maliciously.  “Aren’t you jealous?”

He laughed.

“Please be a little bit jealous.  It would be so flattering.”

“Jealousy is another tradition in which I don’t believe.”

“Then I can’t flirt with you at all?” she sighed.  “After taking all this long hot walk to see you!”

Plop!  The sound punctured the silence sharply, though not loudly.  Some large fruit pod bursting on a distant tree might have made such a report.

“What was that?” asked the girl curiously.

“That?  Oh, that was a revolver shot,” he remarked.

“Aren’t you casual!  Do revolver shots mean nothing to you?”

“That one shakes my soul’s foundations.”  His tone by no means indicated an inner cataclysm.  “It may mean that I must excuse myself and leave.  Just a moment, please.”

Passing across the line of her vision, he disappeared to the left.  When she next heard his voice, it was almost directly above her.

“No,” it said.  “There’s no hurry.  The flag’s not up.”

“What flag?”

“The flag in my compound.”

“Can you see your home from here?”

“Yes; there’s a ledge on the cliff that gives a direct view.”

“I want to come up and see it.”

“You can’t.  It’s much too hard a climb.  Besides, there are rock devilkins on the way.”

“And when you hear a shot, you go up there for messages?”

“Yes; it’s my telephone system.”

“Who’s at the other end?”

“The peon who pretends to look after the quinta for me.”

“A man!  No man can keep a house fit to live in,” she said scornfully.

“I know it; but he’s all I’ve got in the servant line.”

“How far is the house from here?”

“A mile, by air.  Seven by trail from town.”

“Isn’t it lonely?”

“Yes.”

Suddenly she felt very sorry for him.  There was such a quiet, conclusive acceptance of cheerlessness in the monosyllable.

“How soon must you go back?”

“Oh, not for an hour, at least.”

“If it’s a call, it must be an important one, so far from civilization.”

“Not necessarily.  Don’t you ever have calls that are not important?”

No answer came.

“Miss Brewster!” he called.  “Oh, Voice!  You haven’t gone?”

Still no response.

“That isn’t fair,” he complained, making his way swiftly down, and satisfying himself by a peep about the angle commanding her point of the rock that she had, indeed, vanished.  Sadly he descended to his own nook—­and jumped back with a half-suppressed yell.