“Well, well! I guess I’ll go back to figuring the desert. But speaking of age—you guess mine. I’ll bet you can’t come any nearer to mine.”
Gravely she studied him, and in the look and action once more grew composed.
“You’re a masculine Sphinx. Those terrible lines from cheek to jaw—they speak of agony, but not of age. But you’re gray at the temples. Wansfell, you are thirty-seven—perhaps forty.”
“Magdalene Virey!” cried Adam, aghast. “Do I look so old? Alas for vanished youth!... I am only twenty-six.”
It was her turn to be amazed. “We had better confine ourselves to other riddles than love and age. They are treacherous.... Come, let us be going.”
CHAPTER XVII
The hour came when Magdalene Virey stirred Adam to his depths.
“Wansfell,” she said, with a rare and wonderful tremor in her voice, “I love the silence, the loneliness, the serenity—even the tragedy of this valley of shadows. Ah! It is one place that will never be popular with men—where few women will ever come. Nature has set it apart for wanderers of the wastelands, men like you, unquenchable souls who endure, as you said, to fight, to strive, to seek, to find.... And surely for lost souls like me! Most men and all women must find death here, if they stay. But there is death in life. I’ve faced my soul here, in the black, lonely watches of the desert nights. And I would endure any agony to change that soul, to make it as high and clear and noble as the white cone of the mountain yonder.”
Mysterious and inscrutable, the desert influence had worked upon Magdalene Virey. On the other hand, forces destructive to her physical being had attacked her. It was as if an invisible withering wind had blown upon a flower in the night. Adam saw this with distress. But she laughed at the truth of it—laughed without mockery. Something triumphant rang like a bell in her laugh. Always, in the subtlety of character she had brought with her and the mystery she had absorbed from the desert, she stayed beyond Adam’s understanding. It seemed that she liked to listen to his ceaseless importunities; but merciless to herself and aloof from Virey, she refused to leave Death Valley.