Honor tried not to walk too quickly but she kept catching up with the Mexican serving woman and passing her on the path, and falling back again with a smile of apology, and the woman smiled in return, showing white, even teeth. It was not as long a walk as it seemed, but their pace made it consume ten interminable minutes. At length the twisting walk twisted once more and gave on a cleared space, meltingly green, breathlessly still, an ancient stone well in its center.
Josita gestured with a brown hand. "Alla esta Señorito Don Diego! Adios, Señorita!"
"Gracias!" Honor managed.
"Te nada!" She smiled and turned back along the way they had come. "It is nothing!" she had said. Nothing to have brought her on the last stage of her long quest! Jimsy was asleep in the deep grass in the shade. She went nearer to him, stepping softly, hardly breathing. He was stretched at ease, his sleeves rolled high on his tanned arms, his tanned throat bare, his crisp hair rolling back from his brow in the old stubborn wave, his thick lashes on his cheek. His skin was as clean and clear as a little boy's; he looked a little boy, sleeping there. She leaned over him and he stirred and sighed happily, as if dimly aware of her nearness. She tried to speak to him, to say—"Jimsy!" but she found she could not manage it, even in a whisper. So she sat down beside him and gathered him into her arms.
CHAPTER XII
They had a whole hour entirely to themselves and it went far toward restoring the years that the locusts had eaten. It was characteristic of them both that they talked little, even after the long ache of silence. For Jimsy, it was enough to have her there, in his arms, utterly his—to know that she had come to him alone and unafraid across land and sea; and for Honor the journey's end was to find him clear-eyed and clean-skinned and steady. Stephen Lorimer was right when he applied Gelett Burgess' "caste of the articulate" against them; they were very nearly of the "gagged and wordless folk." Yet their silence was a rather fine thing in its way; it expressed them—their simplicity, their large faith. It was not in them to make reproaches. It did not occur to Jimsy to say—"But why didn't you let me know you were coming?—At least you might have let me have the comfort of knowing you were on this side of the ocean!" And Honor never dreamed of saying "But Jimsy,—to rush from Stanford down here without sending me a line!"
Therefore it was somewhat remarkable that it came out, in the brief speeches between the long stillnesses, that Honor knew that Carter had telephoned to his mother as they passed through Los Angeles, and that Mrs. Van Meter had spoken of Honor's return, and she had naturally supposed he would tell Jimsy; and that Jimsy had written her a ten page letter, telling with merciless detail of the one wild party of protest in which he had taken part, of his horror and remorse, of his determination to go to his people in Mexico and stay until he was certain he had himself absolutely in hand and had made up his mind about his future.
"Well, it will be sent back to me from Florence," said Honor, contentedly.