"You don't know what you're saying. And how about your promise? You gave that of your own free will. Was it a thing you give and take back whenever you please? What would your father think of your breaking your word - throwing me off for a man no better than a half-blood Indian? Is that your honor?" Then he was suddenly fearful that he had said too much and hurt his case, and he dropped to a wild pleading: "Oh, Susan, you can't, you can't. You haven't got the heart to treat me so."

She looked down not answering, but her silence gave no indication of a softened response. He seemed to throw himself upon its hardness in hopeless desperation.

"Send him away. He needn't go on with us. Tell him to go back to the Fort."

"Where would we be now without him?" she said and smiled grimly at the thought of their recent perils with the leader absent.

"We're on the main trail. We don't need him now. I heard him say yesterday to Daddy John we'd be in Humboldt in three or four days. We can go on without him, there's no more danger."

She smiled again, a slight flicker of one corner of her mouth. The dangers were over and Courant could be safely dispensed with.

"He'll go on with us," she said.

"It's not necessary. We don't want him. I'll guide. I'll help. If he was gone I'd be all right again. Daddy John and I are enough. If I can get you back as you were before, we'll be happy again, and I can get you back if he goes."

"You'll never get me back," she answered, and rising moved away from him, aloof and hostile in the deepest of all aversions, the woman to the unloved and urgent suitor. He followed her and caught at her dress.

"Don't go. Don't leave me this way. I can't believe it. I can't stand it. If I hadn't grown into thinking you were going to be my wife maybe I could. But it's just unbearable when I'd got used to looking upon you as mine, almost as good as married to me. You can't do it. You can't make me suffer this way."

His complete abandonment filled her with pain, the first relenting she had had. She could not look at him and longed to escape. She tried to draw her dress from his hands, saying:

"Oh, David, don't say any more. There's no good. It's over. It's ended. I can't help it. It's something stronger than I am."

He saw the repugnance in her face and loosened his hold, dropping back from her.

"It's the end of my life," he said in a muffled voice.

"I feel as if it was the end of the world," she answered, and going to the pathway disappeared over its edge.

She walked back skirting the rock's bulk till she found a break in its side, a small gorge shadowed by high walls. The cleft penetrated deep, its mouth open to the sky, its apex a chamber over which the cloven walls slanted like hands with finger tips touching in prayer. It was dark in this interior space, the floor mottled with gleaming sun-spots. Across the wider opening, unroofed to the pale blue of the zenith, the first slow shade was stretching, a creeping gray coolness, encroaching on the burning ground. Here she threw herself down, looking out through the entrance at the desert shimmering through the heat haze. The mist wreaths were dissolving, every line and color glassily clear. Her eyes rested vacantly on it, her body inert, her heart as heavy as a stone.