The Indian girl straightened and stood listening. A brightness flashed over the brown silence of her face and vanished as she moved noiselessly to the door and passed through. Outside, in the sun-filled meadow, the Basque shepherd stood among his sheep, his arms raised, a little wooden flute to his lips. Once more he sounded the clear, sweet call and then, at the sight of the girl, the happiness of the whole earth came rippling and dancing from his flute.
For a moment, the girl remained motionless on the doorstep. Then, without a sign of recognition, glided away toward the dense high reeds of the lake edge. Still playing, the Basque shepherd moved after her through the munching sheep. At the edge of the reeds, the music stopped. He parted them and they closed, thick and blank, behind him.
That evening, Roger and Anne took their last walk. They walked far along the lake, until a chill little wind crept out from the cañons, a jealous little wind, guarding the tremendous silence of the night from these paltry, human intruders.
Roger and Anne turned back. The sheep were huddled a dark mass in the corner of the meadow. Over the embers of a campfire, the Basque herder and two half-breed milkers were playing cards. Against the door of her whitewashed shack the Indian girl leaned, her black hair in two great braids to her waist, facing toward the glow of the dying fire. As Anne and Roger crossed the front yard, she slipped inside and closed the door.
The rotation of the days had fulfilled its promise. The perfect had come to its own end. Anne lay in Roger's arms.
"I always felt there was something perfect somewhere," she whispered.
Roger drew her closer to him.
"I love you, I love you, I love you," he answered hotly. Anne's arms closed about him. Through the force sweeping him, almost to unconsciousness of Anne as a separate body, he felt her lips, warm, soft, as eager as his own.
CHAPTER EIGHT
In the next weeks, it seemed to Anne that the world had been recreated while she and Roger loved by the lake. The old world of definite working hours, through which strangers claimed her physical energy and brain, as deeply strangers one day as the next; the old family life of repression, grown unconscious from habit; minute but never ceasing spiritual adjustment, strengthless rebellions against habits set in steel bands before one awakened to their cramping horror, all had dissolved in a community of interest in a larger and much simpler world.