"No. I loathe you."
Then she began struggling again; he released her, and she flung away and stood facing him, her hat off, hair in disorder, cheeks flaming, her body trembling with rage and dismay.
"Oh, that you could have touched me so!"
"Why, Rita——" he began.
"Don't speak to me——" She moved toward the horses. "I'm going," she asserted.
"Where?"
"To Mesa City."
"How can you? You don't know the way."
"I'll find the way. Oh——" She stamped her foot in rage and then, without other warning, sank on a rock near by and burst into tears.
Jeff Wray rose uncertainly and stared at her, wide-eyed, like other more practiced men in similar situations, unaccountably at a loss. He had acted on impulse with a sense of fitting capably into a situation. He watched her in amazement, for her tears were genuine. No woman was clever enough to be able to cry like that. There was no feminine artistry here. She was only a child who had made the discovery that her doll is stuffed with sawdust. He realized that perhaps for the first time he saw her divested of her artifice, the polite mummery of the world, the real Rita Cheyne, who all her life had wanted to want something and, now that she had found what it was, could not have it just as she wanted it. It was real woe, there was no doubt of that, the pathetic woe of childhood. He went over to her and laid his hand gently on her shoulder. But she would not raise her head, and it almost seemed as though she had forgotten him. He stood beside her for some moments, looking down at her with a changing expression. The hard lines she had discovered in his face were softened, the frown relaxed, and at his lips there came the flicker of a smile.