to his
bed. The left side of his face was drawn grotesquely out of line, but
despite the disfigurement, there was a look of peace in his ravaged
countenance, as of one who welcomes night joyfully and calmly after a
long battle.

Perhaps it was this look of peace that made Ann Leighton regard this
latest as the lightest of all the calamities that had fallen upon her
frail shoulders. She felt that in a measure the catastrophe had brought
the Reverend Orme back--nearer to her heart. Her heart, which had seemed
to atrophy and shrivel from disuse since the poignant fullness of the
last days of Shenton, was suddenly revivified. Love, pity, tender
care,--all the discarded emotions,--returned to light up her withered
face and give it beauty. Night and day she stayed beside the Reverend
Orme, reading aright his slightest movement.

To Natalie one need stood out above all others--the need for Lewis. At
first she waited for news of him, but none came; then she sought out Dom
Francisco. Word was passed to the cattlemen. They said Lewis had been
bound for Oeiras. A messenger was sent to Oeiras. He came back with the
news that Lewis had never arrived there. He had been traced half-way.
After that no one on the long straight trail had seen the boy. The
wilderness had swallowed him.

Dom Francisco came almost daily to see the Reverend Orme. "Behold him!"
he cried at his first visit, aghast at the havoc the stroke had played
with the tall frame. "He is but a boy, he has fathered but two
children--and yet--behold him! He is broken!" The sight of the Reverend
Orme, suddenly grown pitifully old, seemed to work on the white-haired,
but sturdy, cattle-king by reflection. He, too, grew old suddenly.

Natalie was the first to notice it. She began to nurse the old man as
she nursed her father,--to treat him as she would a child. When one day
he spoke almost tremulously of the marriage that was to be, she did not
even answer him, contenting herself with the smile with which one humors
extreme youth clamoring for the moon. Gradually, without any discussion
or open refusal on the part of Natalie, it became understood not only to
Dom Francisco, but to all the circle at Nadir, that she would never
marry the old cattle-king.

The sudden departure of Lewis, the Reverend Orme's breakdown, with its
intimate worry displacing all lesser cares, the absorption of Ann
Leighton as her husband's constant attendant--these things made of
Natalie a woman i