upon her unmade bed.

The first tempest of misery, and rebellion, and self-castigation had
given place to sheer exhaustion. For even suffering has its
limitations; which is perhaps the reason why grief rarely kills. All
the springs of life seemed suddenly to have run down. Her spirit felt
crushed and broken by the obstructiveness of all about her. The strain
of the past three weeks, following upon a severe shock, had told upon
her more than she knew; and this morning's sharp revulsion of feeling
brought her near to purely physical collapse.

And while she lay alone through two endless hours, tracing designs from
the cracks in the whitewashed wall, one conviction haunted her with
morbid persistence. Because she had not valued him in the beginning,
because she had repudiated him in a moment of wounded pride, he would
be taken from her, now that heart and soul were set upon him, and she
would never see him again. It was useless to argue that the idea was
childish; a mere nightmare of overwrought nerves. It persisted and
prevailed, till she felt herself crushed in the grip of a relentless,
impersonal Force, against which neither penitence nor tears would avail.

Finally, worn out with pain and rebellion, she fell asleep.

BOOK III.-THE TENTS OF ISHMAEL.

CHAPTER XVIII.

"Leave the what at the what's-its-name,
Leave the sheep without shelter;
Leave the corpse uninterred,
Leave the bride at the altar."
--Kipling.

Even in a land where danger and discomfort flourish like the ungodly,
that journey from the cedar-crowned Himalayas to the white hot flats of
the Derajat, with the Punjab furnace in full swing, was an experience not
readily forgotten by the three who set out upon it in the dripping grey
dawn of a July morning. Before them stretched two nights and three days
of pure martyrdom, aggravated by that prince of evils--a troubled mind:
for the Desmonds a haunting anxiety, and for Lenox the harassing
realisation that his own strength or weakness during the next few months
stood for no less than the happiness or misery of the only woman on
earth. It is this irrevocable fusion of two lives, and the network of
responsibilities arising from an act less simple than it seems, that
constitute the strength, the charm, the tragedy of marriage: and a dim
foreknowledge of its complexity dawned upon Lenox during his penitential
progress into a land of fire and death.

Throughout their fifty