And if Honor Desmond found the strain of sympathetic anxiety ill to endure, what of Quita, whose life's happiness hung upon the issue?
For her the Kajiar Camp, despite its light-comedy atmosphere, had proved a nightmare of surface hilarity, broken rest, and growing distaste for the man whose name she had permitted to be coupled with her own:—all to no purpose, it seemed, save to inflate his self-satisfaction, and fortify his intention, now too clearly manifest, of hindering to the utmost her reunion with her husband.
Moreover, her self-imposed attitude became increasingly hard to maintain. A flash of defiance is one thing; but sustained defiance, when the heart has unblushingly gone over to the enemy, puts a severe strain upon the nerves.
And what was to be the outcome?
The question stabbed her in the small hours, when ugly possibilities loom large, like figures seen through mist. So strongly had this late love smitten her, that she had been capable of strangling pride, and taking the initiative, had Lenox's bearing given her the smallest hope of success. But unsought surrender, plus the mortification of failure, was more than she felt prepared to risk, even for a chance of winning the one man in all the world:—the man who could at least belong to no other woman, she assured herself with a throb of satisfaction. Thus there seemed no choice left but to go blindly forward along the line of least resistance.
Lenox's non-appearance on Wednesday evening had startled her into fuller knowledge of her dependence on his mere presence to maintain even a mimicry of good spirits; and she heaped contempt upon her own head accordingly. Nevertheless she escaped at an early hour; and lay awake half the night tormenting herself with unanswerable problems.
When breakfast brought no sign of him, she concluded that he must have returned to Dalhousie in disgust: and the conclusion brought her near to the end of her tether. She took refuge in her tent, and, for the first time in many years, sobbed shamelessly, till her eyelids smarted, and her head throbbed and burned. After that she felt better, and her unquenchable courage revived. There is much virtue in your thunder-shower at the psychological moment! She got upon her feet at last; hands pressed against pulsing temples, swaying a little, like a willow that the storm had shaken. But cold water, eau-de-cologne, and the stinging tonic of self-scorn, soon restored her to a semblance of her normal aspect: and by lunch-time she was out again in the mocking sunshine, swept unresisting back into the light-hearted whirl of things.
At tiffin, to her intense relief, Theo Desmond took the empty chair next her own. He had missed her during the morning: and a glance at her face sufficed to give him an inkling of the truth. All his heart went out to her; and he hastened to answer the question in her eyes.
"Lenox went off at sunrise, for a day's shooting," he remarked conversationally, when they had exchanged greetings.
She lifted her eyebrows. "Did he? Sensible man! I suppose he is tired to death of our frivolous fooling."