en love and hate--swept over her as she looked
at the great gaunt form stretched there. Colin was still in riding
clothes and booted and spurred. His moleskins were black with smoke and
charcoal; his flannel shirt, open at the neck, showed red scratches and
scorch-marks on the exposed chest and was torn over the arms, where
were more excoriations of the flesh. And the ravaged face! How hard it
was. How relentless, even in the utter abandonment of bodily
exhaustion! The skin was caked with black dust and sweat. The darkened
thatch of yellow hair was dank and wet. The fair beard, usually so
trim, was singed in places, matted, and had bits of cinder and burnt
leaves sticking to it.

A revolting spectacle, offending Lady Bridget's fine, physical
sensibilities, but a MAN--THE Man. She could not understand that
tornado of emotion which now made her being seem a very battle-ground,
for all the primal passions. She turned away with a sense of nausea,
and then turned to him again with a kind of passionate longing to take
him in her arms--brutal as she thought him, and unworthy of the
affection she had once felt for him--felt still alas!--and all the
romance she had once woven about him.... She saw that a fly was
hovering over the excoriated arm and drew the ragged sleeve over its
bareness. Then she noticed the mosquito net reefed up on a hoop above
the bunk, and managed to get the curtain down so that he should be
protected from the assaults of insects. But as she touched him in doing
this, he stirred and muttered wrathfully in his sleep, as though he
were conscious of her tenderness and would have none of it; she fled
away and came to him no more.

She had been racking her brain since receiving the cablegram as to what
answer she should return to it.

After that pitiable sight of her husband, Bridget moved restlessly
about the house, with intervals of lassitude in the hammock, for she
still felt weak and ill. But quinine was keeping the fever down, and
she resolved that her husband should not again be required to nurse
her. She did not go into the Office any more, but busied herself in a
defiant fashion upon little cares for his comfort when he awoke. He
should see that she did not neglect her house-wifely duties--at least
while she remained there to perform them. The qualification was
significant of her mood.

Thus, she gave orders that the veranda of the Old Humpey should be kept
free from disturbing footsteps, and saw t