THE MAN IN SADDLE
This business of a Son of the Wind was no business for a woman. She ought never to have been in it, or known anything about it. What he was about to do appeared magnanimous to him.
"About what we saw last night," he said; "don't go any more."
She fixed him with such forlorn and dreary amazement that he forgot his scrupulous feeling for not touching her, and took her face between his hands. "It was beautiful, but it is too much for you, it is too far away. You are worn out. You look like a ghost."
"But I am always like this afterward."
"So much the worse! Besides, the journey is too dangerous. It is awful for you, and awful to think of you alone in the middle of the night!"
"But I have always—"
"Promise me!"
"Then I shall never see him again!" She stood, an intense and tragic little figure. The spectacle of her suffering made him ache, but the feeling in it he knew was absurd.
"Remember," he prompted, "you are certain to lose him soon. With the first rains he will be gone." He bent her head back until it rested upon his shoulder and he looked directly down upon her sullen lids. "Why not have the night we saw him together the
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