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Only gloom had saved them this night, and if the darkness of mist and fog and cloud gave way to clear twilight and the sun-glow of approaching day before they reached the kloof he would have to fight in the open.
The supple, graceful lines of him were relaxed, but even her inexperience appreciated the splendid shoulders and the long rippling muscles. The maidenly instinct in her would allow but one glance at him, and she was turning away when his eyes opened. Her face, judging from its tint, might have absorbed some of the sun-glow into which she had been gazing.
But he now boldly pushed on, beckoning De Launay to follow close, and in another minute had emerged on a small sandy plateau, which led, by means of an ascending path, to a rocky eminence, encircled by huge boulders and rocky pinnacles, which somewhat resembled peaks of white coral, and here, on a height above him, with the afternoon sun-glow bathing her in its full mellow radiance, sat a visibly enthroned goddess of the landscape, a girl, or rather a perfect woman, more beautiful than any he had ever seen, or even imagined.
And he knew, without turning his head, that someone was standing in the doorway behind him. There had come a faint noise, a shadowing of the fading sun-glow on the wall, the electrical disturbance of another presence, gazing at him quietly, without motion, and without sound.
A moment, and the luster of the light flung its own magic brilliancy over the Algerine water-line, and then shone full on the heights of El Biar and Bouzariah, and on the lofty, delicate form of the Italian pines that here and there, Sicilian-like, threw out their graceful heads against the amber sun-glow and the deep azure of the heavens.
"No two people have the same." With the falling sun-glow the charm passed off the tree. Chilled and harder, yet less deep, it was no more a block of woven colour, warm and impassive, like a southern goddess; it was now a northern tree, with a grey light through its leaves. "I don't understand you in the least," she said; "everyone wishes to be good." "And safe?" asked Shelton gently.
All day long he climbed and climbed and climbed. Twilight fell. The circle of the sun dropped below the level horizon of the distant fields. One still golden star hung on the fringe of the sun-glow. The stairs began to widen, and presently Giles found himself at the summit of the mountain.
But each succeeding pan added to the depressing conviction that was slowly replacing their hopes. The shadows in the chasm began growing longer and deeper. Far overhead the dense canopies of red pine shut out the last sun-glow of day, and the gathering gloom between the mountains gave warning that in this mysterious world of the ancient cabin the dusk of night was not far away.
She wanted a Chasseur with white hands and a grave smile to be among them; and she shook back her curls, and flushed angrily as she noted his absence, and went on with the pirouettes, the circling flights, the wild, resistless abandonment of her inspirations, till she was like a little desert-hawk that is intoxicated with the scent of prey borne down upon the wind, and wheeling like a mad thing in the transparent ether and the hot sun-glow.
Hours might have passed, or only moments he could not have told; his eyes looked blankly out at the sun-glow, his hand instinctively clinched on the journal whose stray lines had told him in an Algerine trattoria that he had inherited what he never could enjoy. "Are they content, I wonder?" he thought, gazing down that fiery blaze of shadowless light. "Do they ever remember?"
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