He was close enough to Sylvia to touch her when her presence broke down his abstraction and drew his eyes away from whatever object they had been observing away on the horizon.
He stopped as if he had been startled. That was a natural result of Sylvia’s appearance here in this withered place. She was so delicately, fragilely abloom. Her setting should have been some region south of the Caucasus. Her period should have been during the foundations of mythology. She would have made you think of Eve.
And because her hand went to her heart, and her lips parted tremulously, Harboro stopped. It was as if he felt he must make amends. Yet his words were the inevitable banalities.
“You have a fine view here,” he said.
“A fine view!” she echoed, a little incredulously. It was plain that she did not agree with him. “There is plenty of sun and air,” she conceded after a pause.
He rested a heavy hand on the fence. When Harboro stopped you never had the feeling that some of his interests had gone on ahead and were beckoning to him. He was always all there, as if permanently.
He regarded her intently. Her voice had something of the quality of the Träumerei in it, and it had affected him like a violin’s vibrato, accompanying a death scene—or as a litany might have done, had he been a religious man.
“I suppose you find it too much the same, one day after another,” he suggested, in response to that mournful quality in her voice. “You live here, then?”
She was looking across the desert. Where had the goatherd hidden himself? She nodded without bringing her glance to meet Harboro’s.
“I know a good many of the Eagle Pass people. I’ve never seen you before.”