CHAPTER XII
Sandy Larch had driven to Bonesta to meet Mrs. Hallard, Unricht’s telephone message having reached the Palo Verde in due season. The cowboys were all out on the range. There was no one about the corrals when Gard reached the rancho. He had not expected that anyone would be, but the place seemed curiously quiet and deserted. A bunch of future polo ponies in one enclosure were the only creatures in sight as he rode on toward the casa. These nickered to his own horse and the sound brought Wing Chang to the door of his adobe kitchen. The Chinaman’s face wrinkled in a genial smile as he recognized Gard. The latter waved a hand to him and turned toward the horse-rail; for he had caught sight of a slender figure under the cottonwoods.
She rose from the low chair in which she had been sitting, reading, and awaited his coming, there beneath the trees. She was dressed, as usual, in white—a soft, clinging serge to-day, for the December afternoons were growing cool—and she stood, serene and quiet, smiling welcome as he approached, but the eyes veiled by her long lashes were like stars. Gard’s heart cried out to her as he took the slim little hand she held out to him in greeting. He felt like a man reprieved. There was no aversion in her look or manner. Westcott could not yet have wholly blackened his good name before her.
“So you have come back to find everybody gone,” Helen said, offering him the long chair he remembered so well. “This seems to belong to you.”
He declined it—his errand was not one that invited the soul to ease—and took, instead, a camp-stool near the little garden table. Patsy, who had been lying beneath it, came to greet the guest, with wagging recognition.
“There’s nobody gone that I came to see,” Gard answered her remark with a directness that brought the long lashes still further over those starry eyes. Helen had seen him coming far on the desert; had recognized him with a quick, exultant leap of the heart, and had schooled herself to serenity, stilling the tumult within long ere he stood before her.
Nevertheless, she was exquisitely aware of his presence; aware too, that the secret fear of her heart, lest memory might after all have played her false with reference to this man, was dispelled. This was indeed the Gard of her musings. Her veiled eyes took swift woman-cognizance of him; of the strength and poise of his spare, supple frame; the clean wholesomeness of his rugged good looks.
Almost before he spoke, however, she was conscious that something vaguely portentous pulsed beneath the quiet of his manner; something which her own mood failed of grasping. He was stirred to the depths by something not wholly of the present moment. The joyous light of that first instant of meeting had faded from his face, and a shadowy trouble lurked deep within his eyes. She raised her own to meet it with the steady, level glance he remembered as peculiarly her own, seeking to answer the need of his soul.
Gard’s courage was near to failing. It came home to him with terrible force as he met her pure glance, what a monstrous thing this was that he had brought to lay before her sweet, untroubled consciousness. He would have given his life to keep sorrow from her; yet he was hungering this moment to tell her his own.
But he could not let her hear it from other lips than his, and he believed that she must inevitably hear the tale very soon. In a flash he saw, too, that if she but believed him that belief would rob the knowledge of its malignant power. The friendliness of her eyes calmed the storm in his spirit. In that instant he loved her supremely; but for the moment she was more the friend to whose soul he longed to lay bare his own, than the woman he loved, whose faith he longed to feel assurance of.