the sun of midday
But Harboro read no dark meaning into the caress . It seemed to him the natural thing for her to do . Harboro adopted the plan , immediately after his marriage , of walking to his work in the morning and back to his home in the evening . It was only a matter of a mile or so , and if you kept out of the sun of midday , it was a pleasant enough form of exercise . Indeed , in the morning it was the sort of thing a man of varied experiences might have been expected to enjoy : the walk through Eagle Pass , with a glimpse of the Dolch hotel bus going to meet the early train from Spofford Junction , and a friendly greeting from an occasional merchant , and then the breezy passage across the Rio Grande bridge , spanning the meandering waters which never bore vessels of any sort to the far-off sea , and finally the negotiation of the narrow street in Piedras Negras , past the plaza and the bull-ring , and countless little wine-shops , and the market , with its attractively displayed fruits and vegetables from nobody knew where . But it is not to be denied that his practice of making this journey to and fro afoot was not without its prejudicial result . The people of quality of either side of the river rarely ever set foot on the bridge , or on those malodorous streets of Piedras Negras which lay near the river .