“I’ll tell you presently,” he said.  “I’ve trusted you.  I’ll trust you with all. . . .  But let me have my own time.  This is so strange a thing, my wanting to confide in you.  It’s selfish, perhaps.  I have my own ax to grind.  I hope I won’t wrong you.  That’s why I’m going to be perfectly frank.  I might wait for days to get better acquainted.  But the impulse is on me.  I’ve been so interested in all you Mormon women.  The fact—­the meaning of this hidden village is so—­so terrible to me.  But that’s none of my business.  I have spent my afternoons and evenings with these women at the different cottages.  You do not mingle with them.  They are lonely, but have not such loneliness as yours.  I have passed here every night.  No light—­no sound.  I can’t help thinking.  Don’t censure me or be afraid or draw within yourself just because I must think.  I may be all wrong.  But I’m curious.  I wonder about you.  Who are you?  Mary—­Mary what?  Maybe I really don’t want to know.  I came with selfish motive and now I’d like to—­to—­what shall I say?  Make your life a little less lonely for the while I’m here.  That’s all.  It needn’t offend.  And if you accept it, how much easier I can tell you my secret.  You are a Mormon and I—­well, I am only a wanderer in these wilds.  But—­we might help each other. . . .  Have I made a mistake?”

“No—­no,” she cried, almost wildly.

“We can be friends then.  You will trust me, help me?”

“Yes, if I dare.”

“Surely you may dare what the other women would?”

She was silent.

And the wistfulness of her silence touched him.  He felt contrition.  He did not stop to analyze his own emotions, but he had an inkling that once this strange situation was ended he would have food for reflection.  What struck him most now was the girl’s blanched face, the strong, nervous clasp of her hands, the visible tumult of her bosom.  Excitement alone could not be accountable for this.  He had not divined the cause for such agitation.  He was puzzled, troubled, and drawn irresistibly.  He had not said what he had planned to say.  The moment had given birth to his speech, and it had flowed.  What was guiding him?

“Mary,” he said, earnestly, “tell me—­have you mother, father, sister, brother?  Something prompts me to ask that.”

“All dead—­gone—­years ago,” she answered.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen, I think.  I’m not sure.”

“You are lonely.”

His words were gentle and divining.

“O God!” she cried.  “Lonely!”

Then as a man in a dream he beheld her weeping.  There was in her the unconsciousness of a child and the passion of a woman.  He gazed out into the dark shadows and up at the white stars, and then at the bowed head with its mass of glinting hair.  But her agitation was no longer strange to him.  A few gentle and kind words had proved her undoing.  He knew then that whatever her life was, no kindness or sympathy entered it.  Presently she recovered, and sat as before, only whiter of face it seemed, and with something tragic in her dark eyes.  She was growing cold and still again, aloof, more like those other Mormon women.