"You're a real physician?" she asked, her eyes not lifting from the road ahead.
"I am, madam; Douglas Murray, at your service. I arrived in Two Palms about ten minutes ago, and from what I have seen of the place, I do not wonder at your astonishment."
"Oh—I remember now! There were automobiles there." She flashed him a sudden, swift glance, then returned her gaze to the road. "My name is Claire Lee. My father has been hurt—we had a puncture, and while I was fixing it, he wandered off on the hillside. I think he fell. After I got him back into the car, he fainted, and he looked so terribly ill that I stopped at the first opportunity to leave him in the shade, and managed to get him there. The road is so rough that I thought it would hurt his leg——"
"Very well done," said Murray quietly. He wondered what kind of a man her father could be, to let this girl fix a puncture. "The road is pretty bad, beyond a doubt. Was his leg broken?"
"I don't know. I was so afraid—I thought it might have been a rattlesnake, but he said no——"
Something in the way she bit off her words hurriedly and anxiously, struck Murray as out of the ordinary. He dismissed the query as he studied her face, feeling a little in awe of its startling and indefinable beauty. Despite its quietly poised strength, despite the upflung chin, its every line was carven with a rarely delicate precision. Each contour was mose exquisitely balanced. The hands and fingers, too, revealed this same fine artistry of line.
In her face lay character, strong and sensitive; no whit out of drawing, as Murray would have expected to find in a girl of the desert places. Only in her eyes lay a deeply indefinite shadow, a hint of rebellious pride, expectant, as though ready to take up arms instantly against some dogging trouble-maker. The sheer beauty that shone from her clearly level blue eyes and veiled her pale, sun-golden skin, was about her like an evanescent gossamer substance, striking her lightest word into shiftings of lost meanings and half-sensed sweetness.
"Clairedelune!" thought Murray. "Clairedelune—lady of the troubadours, sweet lovehurt of the soul—dear spirit-fragrant whiteness of the silvern moonbeam in the fairy ring! Clairedelune—embodied ecstasy of the poet's soul, the light that never was on land or sea——"
A sardonic curve tipped his lips as the flivver bucked and reared and cracked his brow against its top.
"Oh!" exclaimed the girl penitently. "I'm sorry I I always do the wrong thing with this car. I've just learned to drive it, and it's so different from a Twin-Duplex! I always open the throttle when I mean to close it."