This day of the return from exile no premonition of the inheritance of fate arose to disturb the singing heart of the girl. She rattled on to the stoical Papago at the wheel unending questions concerning her father and the most humble of the Indian retainers living on the rancherias about the oasis, Don Padraic’s fief in the waste lands. She told the credulous Quelele stories of the cities she had seen; of white men’s wickiups climbing as high as the hill of La Nariz; of water so plentiful that it was launched at a burning house out of a long serpent’s mouth; how men lifted themselves above the earth in machines like the king condor and flew hundreds of miles between sun and sun. To all of which big Quelele, never lifting his eyes from the thin rut lines in the sand, answered with a single monosyllable “Hi,” wherein was compounded all his capacity for wonder. South and west about the skirts of the Pajarito they went, and then into the old road up from Caborca, the ancient highway called the Road of the Dead Men which swings north parallel with the Line, cutting the tails of numerous ranges that are great in Arizona. And so, when the day was hardly more than half spent, the little car crawled to the height called the Nose of the Devil, and Benicia saw below her land of desire. Fists of the mountains grudgingly opened out to permit a broad basin running from east to west, and there against the savage baldness of sentinel ranges showed a ribbon of green. Green of precious gems it was. So vivid in the setting of the drought land. So cyclonic its assault of colour against the eye inured to the duns and greys of a hundred miles of parched terrain. And in the midst of the oasis the shining white dot, which was the house of the O’Donoju; of Benicia’s father and his fathers before him back to the day of a royal favourite baptized Michael O’Donohue. The Casa O’Donoju in El Jardin de Soledad--the Garden of Solitude. Indian women, in skirts of orange and cerise and with gay mantles over their sleek hair, lined the way to the avenue of royal date palms which led from the bridge over the Rio Dulce straight to the white single-story house of ’dobe, heavy walled and loopholed like a fort. They waved and sent shouts of welcome to the mistress of the casa as she passed. Benicia knew her father would not be outside the house to greet her; their love was not for the servants to see. Rather he would be waiting in their own trysting place, the place where he had given her farewell two years before. The girl leaped from the car before the heavy studded oak door breaking the solid white front of the house at its centre. It was opened to her by old ’Cepcion, feminine major domo of the household servants. Benicia paused to give the parchment cheeks a kiss, then she danced down a flagged hall to the flare of green marking the patio garden in the centre of the house.