y ill to
endure, what of Quita, whose life's happiness hung upon the issue?

For her the Kajiar Camp, despite its light-comedy atmosphere, had proved
a nightmare of surface hilarity, broken rest, and growing distaste for
the man whose name she had permitted to be coupled with her own:--all to
no purpose, it seemed, save to inflate his self-satisfaction, and fortify
his intention, now too clearly manifest, of hindering to the utmost her
reunion with her husband.

Moreover, her self-imposed attitude became increasingly hard to maintain.
A flash of defiance is one thing; but sustained defiance, when the heart
has unblushingly gone over to the enemy, puts a severe strain upon the
nerves.

And what was to be the outcome?

The question stabbed her in the small hours, when ugly possibilities loom
large, like figures seen through mist. So strongly had this late love
smitten her, that she had been capable of strangling pride, and taking
the initiative, had Lenox's bearing given her the smallest hope of
success. But unsought surrender, plus the mortification of failure, was
more than she felt prepared to risk, even for a chance of winning the one
man in all the world:--the man who could at least belong to no other
woman, she assured herself with a throb of satisfaction. Thus there
seemed no choice left but to go blindly forward along the line of least
resistance.

Lenox's non-appearance on Wednesday evening had startled her into fuller
knowledge of her dependence on his mere presence to maintain even a
mimicry of good spirits; and she heaped contempt upon her own head
accordingly. Nevertheless she escaped at an early hour; and lay awake
half the night tormenting herself with unanswerable problems.

When breakfast brought no sign of him, she concluded that he must have
returned to Dalhousie in disgust: and the conclusion brought her near to
the end of her tether. She took refuge in her tent, and, for the first
time in many years, sobbed shamelessly, till her eyelids smarted, and her
head throbbed and burned. After that she felt better, and her
unquenchable courage revived. There is much virtue in your
thunder-shower at the psychological moment! She got upon her feet at
last; hands pressed against pulsing temples, swaying a little, like a
willow that the storm had shaken. But cold water, eau-de-cologne, and
the stinging tonic of self-scorn, soon restored her to a semblance of her
normal aspect: and by lunch-time she