The tents were pitched in the little plain surrounded by hills. Right and left there
were stretches of tender, vivid green where the young corn was springing; farther
still, on either hand, the plain was yellow with mustard-flower; but in the
immediate foreground it was bare and stony. A few thorny bushes pushed their
straggling way through the dry soil, ineffectively as far as the grace of the
landscape was concerned, for they merely served to emphasise the barren
aridness of the land that stretched before the tents, sloping gradually to the
distant hills.
The hills were uninteresting enough in themselves; they had no grandeur of
outline, no picturesqueness even, though at morning and evening the sun, like a
great magician, clothed them with beauty at a touch.
They had begun to change, to soften, to blush rose red in the evening light, when
a woman came to the entrance of the largest of the tents and looked toward
them. She leaned against the support on one side of the canvas flap, and, putting
back her head, rested that, too, against it, while her eyes wandered over the
plain and over the distant hills.
She was bareheaded, for the covering of the tent projected a few feet to form an
awning overhead. The gentle breeze which had risen with sundown stirred the
soft brown tendrils of hair on her temples, and fluttered her pink cotton gown a
little. She stood very still, with her arms hanging and her hands clasped loosely in
front of her. There was about her whole attitude an air of studied quiet which in
some vague fashion the slight clasp of her hands accentuated. Her face, with its
tightly, almost rigidly closed lips, would have been quite in keeping with the
impression of conscious calm which her entire presence suggested, had it not
been that when she raised her eyes a strange contradiction to this idea was
afforded. They were large gray eyes, unusually bright and rather startling in
effect, for they seemed the only live thing about her. Gleaming from her still, set
face, there was something almost alarming in their brilliancy. They softened with
a sudden glow of pleasure as they rested on the translucent green of the wheat-
fields under the broad generous sunlight, and then wandered to where the pure
vivid yellow of the mustard-flower spread in waves to the base of the hills, now
mystically veiled in radiance. She stood motionless, watching their melting,
elusive changes from palpitating rose to the transparent purple of amethyst. The
stillness of evening was broken by the monotonous, not unmusical creaking of a
Persian wheel at some little distance to the left of the tent. The well stood in a
little grove of trees; between their branches she could see, when she turned her
head, the coloured saris of the village women, where they stood in groups
chattering as they drew the water, and the little naked brown babies that toddled
beside them or sprawled on the hard ground beneath the trees. From the village
