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But the Moment for Sabine had come; she could resist its force no more, every nerve in her whole body was quivering every unknown, though half-guessed emotion was stirring her soul. Her whole being seemed to be convulsed in one concentrated desire. The reality had materialized the echoes she had often dimly felt from that night of long ago.
Valentine's day, with the donor's name unknown, and, of course, the mystery constitutes half the enjoyment. The fourteenth of February was Libbie's birthday too, and many a year, in the happy days of old, had her mother delighted to surprise her with some little gift, of which she more than half-guessed the giver, although each Valentine's day the manner of its arrival was varied.
Weighing on the one hand her love and Oliver Vyell's, on the other the half-guessed injury their marriage might do to him and to others of his race; weighing them not hastily but through long hours of thought: carrying her doubts off to the hills and there considering them in solitude, under the open sky; casting out from the problem all of self save only her exceeding love; this strange girl made strange by man's cruelty decided to give herself in due time, but to exact no marriage.
Two blazing braziers lighted them with weird red and flickering flames. In their depths, cast in black and red shadows, toiled half-guessed figures; from their depths, mounting a single steep plank, came an unbroken procession of natives, naked save for a wisp of cloth around the loins.
It was hard work; and it seemed to have no end. We arrived at last on a knife-edge summit. Here the trees were fewer. We looked abroad over the country we had traversed, and that which lay before us a succession of dark, dim, undulating ridges with cañons and valleys between, slanting from the great ranges at the right to brown rolling hills and the heat-covered, half-guessed plains.
The scene was done in slate gray, darkening to the opaque where a tiny distant rain squall started; lightening in the nearer shadows to reveal half-guessed peaks; brightening unexpectedly into broad short bands of misty gray light slanting from the gray heavens above to the sombre tortured immensity beneath.
But a running accompaniment of music, half-heard, half-guessed, that moves to the mood of the play, now swelling to a climax, now softening to a hush, may do much toward keeping the audience in tune with the emotional significance of the action. A perfect theatrical performance is the rarest of all works of art.
Then his eye fell to the ridge opposite, across the blue cañon. From one point on it a straight column of smoke rolled upward, to mushroom out and hang motionless above the top of the ridge. Its base was shot by half-seen, half-guessed flaming streaks. Bob had vaguely expected to see a whole country-side ablaze. This single, slender column was almost absurd.
The snake, writhing afresh under the punishment, threw himself once more upon the impassive "monkey-puzzle" on four legs, but beyond tearing himself into an even more ghastly apparition than before, he accomplished nothing. Finally he broke away, and slid off, a rustling, half-guessed, fleeting vision, and there was fear at last in those awful eyes, that could never close, as he went.
The king's son was moving about the prison now, examining what he could see especially of the walls with his wonderful, proud eyes, and what he could not with whiskers and nose. He made no sound, of course not so much as a whisper; and when his sister joined him, they were simply intangible, half-guessed shapes, drifting there is no other word for it through the gloom.
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