“It wouldn't be possible, would it, Lee, to have the night go on forever, to have something happen to the scheme of things? Or perhaps I'm blind.” Her voice was plainly terrified. “Light a match, please. Oh, thank you. What an idiot I am. Hold me closer; then I can forget, then nothing else matters. I can never get close enough; I wish I could pour myself into you.” “You'll be able to, if this keeps up,” he observed, with a note of brutality. “They will find us, in the morning, in a bowl and two pitchers.” But there was no corresponding lightness in his spirit; periods like this extended into an infinity of torment beyond time. A thinning of the dark expanded through the room. A cerulean unnatural dawn crept about him: there was the muffled clatter of horses' hoofs in the dust outside; a locomotive whistled in a far universal key. Savina slowly became visible; asleep, her personality, her vividness, were gone; she was as featureless, as pallid, as a nameless marble of remote Greece. There were marks across her feet where the mules chafed her; the mules themselves were lying on the bare floor. He saw his clothes, the familiar habit of the day, with a sharp surprise. * * * * * It had been a night without rest, without the coolness and assuagement of a release from the fever of the day; and, Lee thought, he felt as haggard as Savina looked. A wind that was hardly more than an erratic stirring of super-heated dust agitated a loose slat in a shutter and deposited a fine dun film across the floor. Savina put as much as possible, so early, into her bags. Standing before a narrow mirror nailed to a wall, with her comb, she turned. “My hair is soaked,” she wailed; “just putting my arms up is more than I can manage. Haven't you been thinking about all the cold things in the world?” She slipped into a chair, spent and dejected, with her hair clouding one shoulder. It would, he repeated, be over soon, and he gazed at her with a veiled inspection. Savina was so entirely unprepared for this, the least hardship so new, that he was uncertain about the temper of her resistance. Aware of his gaze, she smiled slowly at him, and, seated, again took up her task with the comb. “I couldn't have you see me very often like this,” she proceeded: “it would be fatal. I don't mean that when I'm finished I'm irresistible, but the process simply must go on in private. I don't want to be a wife, Lee--one of those creatures in a dressing sacque with hair pins in her mouth. I can't bear the thought of you and a flannel petticoat together. That is where married women make a serious mistake: they let their husbands see them while the maid is doing their hair, or when they're smeared with creams, or, maybe, with tonsilitis.” She rose. “I won't be a wife,” she chanted, “I won't be--”