He broke in before she had fairly spoken. "You were mistaken, Winifred; there was no one between us. O my foolish little hot-head! if you had not been so headlong in your self-sacrifice--if you had only waited till I came back--I could have showed you in ten minutes that there was no place for it. Mollie is married to John Gates and is very happy. And you and I--my little girl, how nearly our two lives have been spoiled! Sweetheart," he said, laughing with a shaky voice, "I think I shall never dare let go of you again"--and he drew her back to him. She hesitated--surrendered--clung to him with a long sobbing breath. "Oh, I have wanted you so, I have _wanted_ you so!" she cried. "Oh, don't be a dream and melt away this time!" Will Strong, standing close in the darkness of the oleander, acquiring a life-long association with smell of Madeira vine and oleander and wet earth, cry of crickets and noise of sprinkling water, gathered himself together enough to creep away. He was _going_ to realize it pretty soon, he thought; he did not yet; it seemed likely to be beyond endurance when he did. As he passed the door some one opened it, and the lamp-light streamed about him; Winifred looked around and saw his face for an instant, and then he had slipped away through a side gate. He walked out from town across miles of dark plain, until he came to the empty channel of the stream by which they had sat in March. Underfoot not a blade of grass or green thing; no stranger would have believed that living thing had ever grown there. The flocks and herds had long since gone to the mountain pastures. The dry channel between shelvy banks of gravel showed white in the unclouded yet dull starlight. The air was lifeless, and faintly tainted with smoke from forest fires in the mountains. Will threw himself down on his face, clutching with his fingers at the gritty dirt. He knew as surely then, looking forward to his life, as he will know at the end looking back, that this would never be an out-lived romance. Nor could he creep back into that temple of dreams from which Winifred's own hand had lured him--it had crumbled to dust behind him. Nor was he like one who, losing a woman, loses only his best pleasure and best ambition; she was the vital condition to every pleasure, every ambition; losing her, he lost all. The realization clutched him by this time like a tiger. There was not a living creature within miles; a man might go down to primal depths, might drop even the restraint of the human in outcries and struggles as free as a tortured beast's. It may be that solitude sees more such scenes than a decently decorous world would like to think.