Sylvia heard Runyon’s musical laugh. He bent his head close to hers. “We’re all right now,” he said.
He had his arm across her shoulder and was drawing her close. “It’s going to be cold,” he said, as if in explanation. He seemed as joyous as a boy—as innocent as a boy. She inclined her head until it rested on his shoulder, so that both occupied little more than the space of one. The storm made this intimacy seem almost natural; it made it advantageous, too.
And so the infinite sands swarmed over them, and the norther shrieked in their ears, and the earth’s blackness swallowed them up until they seemed alone as a man and a woman never had been alone before.
The rebozo sagged about them at intervals, weighted down with the dust; but again it rippled like a sail when an eccentric gust swept away the accumulated sediment.
The desert was a thing of blank darkness. A protected torch would have been invisible to one staring toward it a dozen steps away. A temporary death had invaded the world. There was neither movement nor sound save the frenzied dance of dust and the whistle of winds which seemed shunted southward from the north star.
Runyon’s hand travelled soothingly from Sylvia’s shoulder to her cheek. He held her to him with a tender, eloquent pressure. He was the man, whose duty it was to protect; and she was the woman, in need of protection.
And Sylvia thought darkly of the ingenuities of Destiny which set at naught the petty steps which the proprieties have taken—as if the gods were never so diverted as when they were setting the stage for tragedy, or as if the struggles and defeats of all humankind were to them but a proper comedy.
But Runyon was thinking how rare a thing it is for a man and a woman to be quite alone in the world; how the walls of houses listen, and windows are as eyes which look in as well as out; how highways forever hold their malicious gossips to note the movements of every pair who do not walk sedately; how you may mount the stairway of a strange house—and encounter one who knows you at the top, and who laughs in his sleeve; how you may emerge from the house in which you have felt safe from espionage—only to encounter a familiar talebearer at the door.
But here indeed were he and Sylvia alone.
CHAPTER XXIII