"Not when you promised?" the child urged piteously.
There was silence. Muriel's face was hidden. Her black hair hung about her like a cloud, veiling her from her friend's eyes. For a long time she said nothing whatever. Then at last without moving she made reply.
"It's no use, Olga. I can't! I can't! It's not my doing. It's his. Oh, I think my heart is broken!" Through the anguish of weeping that followed, Olga clasped her passionately close, frightened, by an intensity of suffering such as she had never seen before and was powerless to alleviate.
She slept with Muriel that night, but, waking in the dawning, just when Muriel had sunk to sleep, she crept out of bed and, with Nick's ring grasped tightly in her hand, softly stole away.
PART V
CHAPTER XLV
THE VISION
A gorgeous sunset lay in dusky, fading crimson upon the Plains, trailing to darkness in the east. The day had been hot and cloudless, but a faint, chill wind had sprung up with the passing of the sun, and it flitted hither and thither like a wandering spirit over the darkening earth.
Down in the native quarter a tom-tom throbbed, persistent, exasperating as the voice of conscience. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked restlessly, at irregular intervals. And at a point between tom-tom and dog a couple of parrots screeched vociferously.
Over all, the vast Indian night was rushing down on silent, mysterious wings. Crimson merged to grey in the telling, and through the falling dark there shone, detached and wonderful, a single star.