"Dear fellow, I want to go alone," she replied.

"Ah!" Alfred exclaimed, suddenly serious. He gave her just a
quick glance, then turned away. "Go ahead. I think it's safe.
I'll make it safe by sitting here with my glass and keeping an
eye on you. Be careful coming down the trail. Let the horse
pick his way. That's all."

She rode Majesty across the wide flat, up the zigzag trail,
across the beautiful grassy level to the far rim of the mesa, and
not till then did she lift her eyes to face the southwest.

Madeline looked from the gray valley at her feet to the blue
Sierra Madres, gold-tipped in the setting sun. Her vision
embraced in that glance distance and depth and glory hitherto
unrevealed to her. The gray valley sloped and widened to the
black sentinel Chiricahuas, and beyond was lost in a vast
corrugated sweep of earth, reddening down to the west, where a
golden blaze lifted the dark, rugged mountains into bold relief.
The scene had infinite beauty. But after Madeline's first swift,
all-embracing flash of enraptured eyes, thought of beauty passed
away. In that darkening desert there was something illimitable.
Madeline saw the hollow of a stupendous hand; she felt a mighty
hold upon her heart. Out of the endless space, out of silence
and desolation and mystery and age, came slow-changing colored
shadows, phantoms of peace, and they whispered to Madeline. They
whispered that it was a great, grim, immutable earth; that time
was eternity; that life was fleeting. They whispered for her to
be a woman; to love some one before it was too late; to love any