t Helen of Troy.

'You're feeling your nose--you've been looking at a glass!' Kiomi said,
with supernatural swiftness of deduction on her return.

She added for my comfort that nothing was broken, but confessed me to be
still 'a sight'; and thereupon drove knotty language at Eveleen. The girl
retorted, and though these two would never acknowledge to me that any of
their men had been in this neighbourhood recently, the fact was treated
as a matter of course in their spiteful altercation, and each saddled the
other with the mistake they had committed. Eveleen snatched the last
word. What she said I did not comprehend, she must have hit hard. Kiomi's
eyes lightened, and her lips twitched; she coloured like the roofing
smoke of the tent fire; twice she showed her teeth, as in a spasm, struck
to the heart, unable to speak, breathing in and out of a bitterly
disjoined mouth. Eveleen ran. I guessed at the ill-word spoken. Kiomi sat
eyeing the wood-ashes, a devouring gaze that shot straight and read but
one thing. They who have seen wild creatures die will have her before
them, saving the fiery eyes. She became an ashen-colour, I took her
little hand. Unconscious of me, her brown fingers clutching at mine, she
flung up her nostrils, craving air.

This was the picture of the woman who could not weep in her misery.

'Kiomi, old friend!' I called to her. I could have cursed that other
friend, the son of mischief; for she, I could have sworn, had been
fiercely and wantonly hunted. Chastity of nature, intense personal pride,
were as proper to her as the free winds are to the heaths: they were as
visible to dull divination as the milky blue about the iris of her
eyeballs. She had actually no animal vileness, animal though she might be
termed, and would have appeared if compared with Heriot's admirable
Cissies and Gwennies, and other ladies of the Graces that run to fall,
and spend their pains more in kindling the scent of the huntsman than in
effectively flying.

There was no consolation for her.

The girl Eveleen came in sight, loitering and looking, kicking her idle
heels.

Kiomi turned sharp round to me.

'I'm going. Your father's here, up at Bulsted. I'll see him. He won't
tell. He'll come soon. You'll be fit to walk in a day. You're sound as a
nail. Goodbye--I shan't say good-bye twice,' she answered my attempt to
keep her, and passed into the tent, out of which she brought a small
bundle tied in a yellow handkerchief,