“Oh, ‘Mona,’ is it?” thought Suffield, with an internal grin. Then aloud, rather anxiously, “Anything else besides the wrist?”
“I’ve banged up a knee a good bit; but I expect it’s only bruised. Now we’d better start. I seem to be getting all right.”
He was ghastly pale as he tottered to his feet, evidently still in great pain.
“No, never mind,” he went on; “I don’t want any help, I can walk all right.”
But as they began the descent of the gully, Suffield, carrying both rifles and the dead eagle, leading the way, he felt faint and dizzy. In an instant Mona’s hand had closed upon his. Hitherto she had stood silently aloof in the revulsion of feeling. He was safe now. The words which had been wrung from her by the extremity of his peril must be regarded as unsaid. So she resolved—but was it a revolution that came within her power to keep? The volcanic fires of her strong, passionate, sensuous temperament had lain dormant beneath an egotistic and inconsiderate vanity, had lain dormant, unknown even to herself. Now they were to burst forth with a force, and to an extent, unsuspected by herself, and as startling as they had been hitherto unknown. But on one point there was no room for any more self-deception. Whatever half-truth there might have been in Grace Suffield’s oft-uttered prediction, now it had become all truth. Mona realised that her tarn had indeed come—for good and for ill, for once and for ever.
Chapter Ten.
“I Have Won You!”
The alarm and concern felt by Grace Suffield on the return of the trio, Roden with his arm in a sling, and looking rather pale and, as he jocosely put it, interesting, almost beggars description; and the way in which her concern found expression in rating, womanlike, the person whose chief raison d’être was to be rated—viz., her husband, was beautiful to behold.