Across the Desert to the End

If she perceived anything there was not the slightest reflection of it
within her eyes. Lustreless, undeviating, they were staring directly
ahead into the gloom, her face white and almost devoid of expression.
The sight of it turned him cold and sick, his unoccupied hand gripping
the saddle-pommel as though he would crush the leather. Yet he did not
speak, for there was nothing to say. Between these two was a fact,
grim, awful, unchangeable. Fronting it, words were meaningless,
pitiable.

He had never before known that she could ride, but he knew it now. His
eye noted the security of her seat in the saddle, the easy swaying of
her slender form to the motion of the pony, in apparent unconsciousness
of the hard travelling or the rapidity of their progress. She had
drawn back the long tresses of her hair and fastened them in place by
some process of mystery, so that now her face was revealed unshadowed,
clearly defined in the starlight. Dazed, expressionless, as it
appeared, looking strangely deathlike in that faint radiance, he loved
it, his moistened eyes fondly tracing every exposed lineament. God!
but this fair woman was all the world to him! In spite of everything,
his heart went forth to her unchanged. It was Fate, not lack of love
or loyalty, that now set them apart, that had made of their future a
path of bitterness. In his groping mind he rebelled against it, vainly
searching for some way out, urging blindly that love could even blot
out this thing in time, could erase the crime, leaving them as though
it had never been. Yet he knew better. Once she spoke out of the
haunting silence, her voice sounding strange, her eyes still fixed in
that same vacant stare ahead into the gloom.