"I am, madam; Douglas Murray, at your service. I arrived in Two Palms about ten minutes ago, and from what I have seen of the place, I do not wonder at your astonishment." "Oh--I remember now! There were automobiles there." She flashed him a sudden, swift glance, then returned her gaze to the road. "My name is Claire Lee. My father has been hurt--we had a puncture, and while I was fixing it, he wandered off on the hillside. I think he fell. After I got him back into the car, he fainted, and he looked so terribly ill that I stopped at the first opportunity to leave him in the shade, and managed to get him there. The road is so rough that I thought it would hurt his leg----" "Very well done," said Murray quietly. He wondered what kind of a man her father could be, to let this girl fix a puncture. "The road is pretty bad, beyond a doubt. Was his leg broken?" "I don't know. I was so afraid--I thought it might have been a rattlesnake, but he said no----" Something in the way she bit off her words hurriedly and anxiously, struck Murray as out of the ordinary. He dismissed the query as he studied her face, feeling a little in awe of its startling and indefinable beauty. Despite its quietly poised strength, despite the upflung chin, its every line was carven with a rarely delicate precision. Each contour was mose exquisitely balanced. The hands and fingers, too, revealed this same fine artistry of line. In her face lay character, strong and sensitive; no whit out of drawing, as Murray would have expected to find in a girl of the desert places. Only in her eyes lay a deeply indefinite shadow, a hint of rebellious pride, expectant, as though ready to take up arms instantly against some dogging trouble-maker. The sheer beauty that shone from her clearly level blue eyes and veiled her pale, sun-golden skin, was about her like an evanescent gossamer substance, striking her lightest word into shiftings of lost meanings and half-sensed sweetness. "Clairedelune!" thought Murray. "Clairedelune--lady of the troubadours, sweet lovehurt of the soul--dear spirit-fragrant whiteness of the silvern moonbeam in the fairy ring! Clairedelune--embodied ecstasy of the poet's soul, the light that never was on land or sea----" A sardonic curve tipped his lips as the flivver bucked and reared and cracked his brow against its top. "Oh!" exclaimed the girl penitently. "I'm sorry I I always do the wrong thing with this car. I've just learned to drive it, and it's so different from a Twin-Duplex! I always open the throttle when I mean to close it." So she had been driving a Twin-Duplex! The more Murray studied her, the more her presence here puzzled him. Wealth and breeding--even in the lines of the khaki dress was the one, and the other lay in her eyes. "You've not been long in this country?" he asked.