A bell had been tinkling nearer and nearer on the road ahead. Now a heavy wagon, filled with sacks of ore, came into view, drawn by four mules. As they stood aside to let it pass he scanned her face for any sign it might show, but he could see no more than a look of interest for the brawny driver of the wagon, shouting musically to his straining team. "You are rather inscrutable," he said, as they resumed the road. She turned and smiled into his eyes with utter frankness. "At least you must be sure that I like you; that I am very friendly; that I want to know you better, and want you to know me better. You don't know me at all, you know. You Westerners have another way, of accepting people too readily. It may work no harm among yourselves, but perhaps Easterners are a bit more perilous. Sometimes, now, a _very_ Eastern person doesn't even accept herself--himself--very trustingly; she--he--finds it so hard to get acquainted with himself." The young man provided one of those silences of which a few discerning men are instinctively capable and for which women thank them. "This road," she said, after a little time of rapid walking, "leads right up to the end of the world, doesn't it? See, it ends squarely in the sun." They stopped where the turn had opened to the west a long vista of grey and purple hills far and high. They stood on a ridge of broken quartz and gneiss, thrown up in a bygone age. To their left a few dwarf Scotch firs threw shadows back toward the town. The ball of red fire in the west was half below the rim of the distant peak. "Stand so,"--she spoke in a slightly hushed tone that moved him a step nearer almost to touch her arm,--"and feel the round little earth turning with us. We always think the sun drops down away from us, but it stays still. Now remember your astronomy and feel the earth turn. See--you can actually _see_ it move--whirling along like a child's ball because it can't help itself, and then there's the other motion around the sun, and the other, the rushing of everything through space, and who knows how many others, and yet we plan our futures and think we shall do finely this way or that, and always forget that we're taken along in spite of ourselves. Sometimes I think I shall give up trying; and then I see later that even that feeling was one of the unknown motions that I couldn't control. The only thing we know is that we are moved in spite of ourselves, so what is the use of bothering about how many ways, or where they shall fetch us?" "Ah, Miss Khayyam, I've often read your father's verses." "No relation whatever; we're the same person--he was I." "But don't forget you can see the earth moving by a rising as well as by a setting star, by watching a sun rise--" "A rising star if you wish," she said, smiling once more with perfect candour and friendliness. They turned to go back in the quick-coming mountain dusk.