And so with wholesome words of reassurance he left her, and she went to prepare for her journey. When Burke joined her again, they spoke only of casual things, avoiding all mention of Guy or Kieff by tacit consent. He was very considerate for her, making every possible provision for her comfort, but his manner was aloof, almost forbidding. There was no intimacy between them, no confidence, no comradeship. They reached Ritzen in the late afternoon. Burke suggested spending the night there, but she urged him to continue the journey. The heat of the day was over; there was no reason for lingering. So they found their horses, and started on the long ride home. They rode side by side along the dusty track through a barren waste that made the eyes ache. A heavy stillness hung over the land, making the loneliness seem more immense. They scarcely spoke at all, and it came to Sylvia that they were stranger to each other now than they had been on that day at the very beginning of their acquaintance when he had first brought her to Blue Hill Farm. She felt herself to be even more of an alien in this land of cruel desolation than when first she had set foot in it. It was like a vast prison, she thought drearily, while the grim, unfriendly _kopjes_ were the sentinels that guarded her, and the far blue mountains were a granite wall that none might pass. The sun was low in the sky when they reached the watercourse. It was quite dry with white stones that looked like the skeletons of the ages scattered along its bed. "Shall we rest for a few minutes?" said Burke. But she shook her head. "No--no! Not here. It is getting late." So they crossed the _spruit_ and went on. The sun went down in an opalescent glow of mauve and pink and pearl that spread far over the _veldt_, and she felt that the beauty of it was almost more than she could bear. It hid so much that was terrible and cruel. They came at length, when the light was nearly gone, to a branching track that led to the Merstons' farm. Burke broke his silence again. "I must go over and see Merston in the morning." She felt the warm colour flood her face. How much had the Merstons heard? She murmured something in response, but she did not offer to accompany him. A deep orange moon came up over the eastern hills and lighted the last few miles of their journey, casting a strange amber radiance around them, flinging mysterious shadows about the _kopjes_, shedding an unearthly splendour upon the endless _veldt_. It spread like an illimitable ocean in soundless billows out of which weird rocks stood up--a dream-world of fantastic possibilities, but petrified into stillness by the spell of its solitudes--a world that once surely had thrilled with magic and now was dead. As they rode past the last _kopje_--her _kopje_ that she had never yet climbed, they seemed to her to enter the innermost loneliness of all, to reach the very heart of the desert.