Thy Heart's Desire
I
THE tents were pitched in a little plain surrounded by hills. Right and left there were stretches of tender vivid green where the young corn was springing; further 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 towards them. She leant 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.
