Felicia leaned against his knee. No little girl ever had done so before and Roger looked at her curiously.
"The desert's awful homely, isn't it?" she said.
"It certainly is," agreed Ernest, lighting a fresh cigar.
For a moment the three stared at the unending wastes of brown and gray-green, belled over by a cloudless sapphire sky.
"Homely and hot, but I don't care as long as I'm where Charley is. I don't remember her, but I know how I'm going to feel about her." Here she took a long look into Roger's gray eyes. "I guess I'd like to sit in your lap," she suggested.
Roger lifted her to his knees and she settled back comfortably in the hollow of his arm. A flooding sense of tenderness surprised him into silence.
"You are deserting me," protested Ernest.
"No, I'm not," returned little Felicia Preble. "I like you very much but I feel as if I'd like to sit in Roger's lap."
And in Roger's lap she sat, while the racing purple shadows on the yellow desert gradually grew black, until the yellow turned to lavender, and both gradually merged into a twilight that was silvered by star-glow before the last crimson disappeared in the west. She sat there long after Ernest went inside to read, in the same quiet that enwrapped Roger. It was a strange quiet for Roger; a quiet of sweetness and content that he had not known since his mother's death. With that warm, supple little body pressed against him, his mind for once left his work and paused to ponder on the loneliness of the past sixteen years and on the thrilling promise of the desert star-glow. No human being can be completely sane who does not pause at intervals to express the tenderness that marks humans from animals. But Roger did not know this.
It was six o'clock in the morning when the train pulled in to Archer's Springs and Ernest, Roger and Felicia alighted. They stood for a moment in silence after the train pulled out. They were apparently the only persons awake in the world.