"Jeanne," he whispered, "Jeanne, little girl——" and then the lips ceased to move, he shuddered slightly through the length of him, his eyes closed, and he slept.
The thick cup thudded heavily upon the floor and its contents splashed unheeded over her gown, as the girl sat motionless, staring past the bunk at the blank wall of logs.
The little nickel-plated alarm-clock ticked loudly in sharp, insistent threes, as she sat, white of face, with set lips and unwinking eyes staring stonily at the parallel logs of the wall.
Centuries of supercultivation and the refinement of breeding were concentrated in that white-lipped, cold-eyed stare, which is the heart-mask of the recherché woman of empire. And then—the mask dropped.
The inevitable artificiality of years of unconscious eugenic selection melted in a breath before the fierce onrush of savage emotion. The girl sprang to her feet as the hot blood surged to her face and paced frantically back and forth in a fume of primordial hate. Her small fists clenched till pink nails bit deep into soft, pink palms. Her nostrils dilated, quivering; her eyes flashed, and the breath hissed through her lips in deep sobs of impotent rage against the woman who had robbed her of this man's love and whose name was upon his lips in the first moment of his awakening.
She paused and gazed into the face of the man who was the hero of her fondest dreams—the man who had overcome obstacles, who defied danger and death, and had won, with his two hands and the great force of his personality, the respect and devotion of the big men of the rough country.
And he was hers—never had he been aught else but hers—and she had lost him! Wildly she resumed her restless pacing, while the words of the half-breed rang in her ears: "She is beautiful, and she loves him."
She halted abruptly, and in her eye flashed a momentary ray of hope; the man had said, not "He loves her," but, "She loves him." Could it be—but, no, there were his own words, spoken at the time of their first meeting in the gloom of this very room: "I forgot that I have not the right—that there is another."
And was it not her name that sprang to his lips in the half-consciousness of a few moments ago? In her mind she pictured the wild, dark beauty of the other girl, and in the jealous fury of her heart could have torn her in pieces with her two hands.
"M's'u' Bill drinks no whisky"—the dream of her life had been realized, but in the realization she had been beaten—all her hopes and prayers, the long, bitter hours of her soul-anguish, which burned and gnawed beneath the stoicism and apathy her environment demanded, had gone for naught, and she, who had borne the brunt of the long battle, was brushed aside and forgotten.