Accompanied by Marcelita alone, Eva, toward evening, set out on her usual ramble, following the road from which the path branched off, leading into the valley. At the point where the road falls off toward Tucson, she stopped before taking the path that led to the spring, and cast a long, shivering look around her. Wearily her eyes roamed over the desolate land; wearily they followed the road, with its countless windings, far into the level country; wearily they watched the flight of a solitary crow, flapping its wings as it hovered, with a doleful cry, over the one, single tree on the plain, that held its ragged branches up to the sky, as though pleading for the dews of heaven to nurture and expand its stunted growth. An endless, dreary waste—an infinitude of hopeless, changeless desert—a hard, yellow crust, where the wind had left it bare from sand, above which the air was still vibrating from the heat of the day, though the breeze that came with the sunset had already sprung up; the only verdure an occasional bush of grease-wood, or mesquite, with never a blade of grass, nor a bunch of weeds, in the wide spaces between.
Farther on to her right, she could see the rough, frowning rocks in the mountain yonder, looking as though evil spirits had piled them there, in well-arranged confusion, to prevent the children of earth from taking possession of its steep heights, and its jealously-hidden treasures.
Grand, and lonely, and desolate looked the mountain, and lonely and desolate looked the plain, as Eva stood there, her hands folded and drooping, the light wind tossing her hair, and fluttering and playing in the folds of her dress. It was the picture of her own life unfolding before her: lone, and drear, and barren; without change or relief, without verdure, or blossom, or goodly springs of crystal water; the arid desert—her life, dragging its slow length along; the frowning mountain—her duties, and the unavoidable tasks that life imposed on her.
With a sigh she turned from both. Before her lay the cool valley, sheltered from careless eyes, and from the sand and dust of the road and the country beyond. Very small was the valley of the spring, with its laughing flowers and shady trees—like the one leaf from the volume of her memory that was tinted with the color of the rose and the sunbeam.
"And up the valley came the swell of music on the wind"—bringing back scenes on which the sun had thrown its glorious parting rays in times past, when life had seemed bright, and full of promise and inexhaustible joy. But she brought her face resolutely back to the desert and the mountain.
She walked on rapidly toward the spring where Marcelita had spread her rebozo on the trunk of a fallen tree, before starting out to gather the flowers that grew in the valley.
Almost exhausted, Eva had seated herself on the improvised couch, but was startled by a step beside her. Was it a spirit conjured up by the flood of memories surging through her breast that stood before her?
"Eva!"
"Charlie, oh, Charlie! have you come at last?" But already the spell was broken.
"I cannot think why Lieutenant Addison should wish to surprise me here. Would it not be more fitting to visit our quarters, if he felt constrained to comply with the etiquette of the garrison?"