Spaces and freedom! Robin looked up at the stars and wondered how she would have described that luminous, silver-spangled sky, what feelings would have moved her and what she would have said if she had been riding knee to knee with him across those rolling plains, guided by the Big Dipper and an instinctive sense of location. He knew quite well what Ivy would say, but what she would feel he doubted if she would know herself, because Ivy was a curiously dumb soul. Expression was strangled in her. She could only act, and act often with the driving impulse terribly obscured. In all their companionship Robin had been compelled to gauge Ivy’s deepest thoughts and feelings by outward manifestation alone. It seemed to Robin a wonderful thing to meet a girl who could talk in clear simple words about what she thought and felt about such puzzling sensations as came over a man when he looked at the vastness and wonder and mystery of the world he lived in. That quality of wonder, of space and time in which man danced his little turn and danced no more, in which there seemed much disorder but in which there seemed also a Law and a Pattern and a Purpose if a man could only discover what it was, had troubled Robin for a long time. She had been glad to sit there on her horse talking to him, to ride with him a few miles when she could just as well have ridden the other way. Robin knew that May wanted to see him again. She wanted him to come to that dance. There was no conceit in that certainty. He felt it. And he was troubled just a little. He wasn’t sure it would be wise for him. His future, the immediate future which should logically extend into the remote, was linked close with Ivy Mayne’s, and as he rode toward the Block S Robin did not dream of it being otherwise, did not even harbor the secret wish that it should be otherwise. He could admire anything that was lovely without any sense of being fickle or faithless. But he did have a faint apprehension that it would not be well for any of them if he should admire May Sutherland too long or at too close range.