to one; most terribly, a battle because there seemed
such a beauty about the yearning which the girl awoke in him.

He was abroad early next day. The thought had come, that she might
find him in the jungle at noon or soon afterward as yesterday. As the
dragging forenoon wore on, Skag was in tightening tension. He hated
himself for this, but the fact stubbornly remained that all he cared
for in the world was the meeting again. It seemed greater than
he--this agony of separation. It brought all fears and
self-diminishing. It told him that Carlin would run from him, if she
knew he wanted her presence so. He knew her kind of woman loves
self-conquest--the man who can powerfully wait and not be victimised by
his own emotions. . . .

So it was that Skag fled from himself, when there was still a half hour
before noon. He could not meet her, longing like this.

There was sweat on Skag's forehead as his limbs quickened away from the
place of meeting yesterday. The more he left it behind, the more sure
he became that Carlin would come. It seemed he was casting away the
one dear and holy thing he had ever known--yet it resolved to this:
that he dared not stand before her with his heart beating as if he had
run for miles and his chest suffocating with emotions--the very
features of his face uncertain, his voice unreliable. . . . If a man
entered the cage of a strange tiger, as little master of himself as
this--it would be taking his life in his own silly hands. Skag
couldn't get past this point, and he had a romantic adjustment in his
mind about Carlin and the tiger--one all his own.

Deeper and deeper into the jungle he went, along the little river, but
all paths appeared to lead him to the monkey glen; and there he sat
down at last and remembered all that Alec Binz had told him about
handling himself in relation to handling animals, and all that Cadman
Sahib had told him from the lips of wise men of India . . . but all
that Skag could find was pain--rising, thickening clouds of pain.

He kept seeing her continually as she entered the jungle (walking so
silently and swift, her face flushed from crossing the open space this
side of the city in the terrible heat of noon)--and then not finding
him there. Something about this hurt like degrading a sacred thing,
but he didn't mean to. He repeated that he didn't mean to hurt
her. . . . Then suddenly it occurred to him that it was all his own
thinking about her comi