It was incredibly still here; neither bird hopped nor insect hummed. The shadows shook in the wind. I sat with my head against the pine and my eyes closed. By degrees I thought the wind increased and drew into a long whisper which was my name. This fancy comforted me with the notion that whoever abandoned me, the wood was still my own. I heard it several times before a crackling in the bushes aroused me. I turned to observe another woman struggling anear through the thick stems of manzanita. As she crept and wormed toward me she drew on to her knees in the open space under the tent of the pine. Then I saw that she was the tall woman who had loved Ravenutzi. I saw more than that; she had come to me through great difficulty and by hard ways, her dress was torn, her hands scratched and bleeding, her hair, which was bound under a leathern snood, disheveled. But whatever her difficulties, they had not marred her so much as the passions that wasted her from within. She was more beautiful; the long, flushed throat, the red, scorning lip, the eyes darkened and hollow. But she was so plainly gnawed upon by grief that as we knelt there, I half risen on my knees and she on hers confronting me, I could feel nothing but pity. “You!” I whispered dryly. “Speak low,” she said, though indeed we had done nothing else, so did the stillness of the place weigh upon us. We were completely isolated in a ring of shadow, the chaparral coming up to the outer boughs of the pine, and the fan-spread branches meeting it a foot above our heads. “I have waited for you all day,” she whispered. “Tell me, have you found him? Where has he taken her?” “I do not know. We have no trace of them.” “But which way did they go? From what point did they leave the Meet? Something—surely you know something?” She clasped her cut palms together, and I saw a slight flinching at the pain they gave her. She cast it off impatiently as though it were an interruption to her understanding. “Tell me first what you are to him, that you should ask?” “His wife!” “You—so young——” I had an instant vision of Ravenutzi’s white hair, and then as I had first seen him washing his hair at the pool of the Leaning Bay. At the recollection, and perhaps a slight flicker of amusement in her face, the two things leaped together in my mind. “Was that also a pretence?” “There are herbs which will bleach the color from the hair and draw the skin in wrinkles,” she said. “He had more years than I, but we were young.” “And the hostage, too, was it all a pretence from the beginning?” “What else?” impatiently. “The King’s Desire was ours, and we schemed to get it back as we had first won it. I was as willing as the rest when we began. If I was not to see him again for three years, that was my part of the service, and I was proud to pay it. But I never thought of this. Oh no, never this!” She crept up to me and eased the strained position of her limbs.