e current
of a certain joy of living, long since sluggish, congealed, now coursed
swiftly and without hinderance through his being.

Now through all those hours of tedious travelling--in the flaming glow
of day, or in the still, cool watches of the night, he had with him a
recollection--Lilith Ormskirk's face haunted him. Those eyes seemed to
follow him--sweet, serious; or again mirthful, flashing from out their
dark fringe of lashes, but ever entrancing, ever inviting. Her whole
personality, in fact, seemed to pervade his mind, warring for sole
possession, to the exclusion of all other thought, all other
consideration. Into the conflict his own mind entered with a zest. It
was a psychological struggle which appealed to him, and that thoroughly.
She should not, by her witchery, take entire possession. Yet the
recollection of her was so potent that at length he ceased to strive
against it. He gave way,--abandoned himself contentedly, voluptuously to
its sway,--even aiding it in the pictures it conjured up. Now he saw
her, as he had first passed her, day after day on board ship, with
indifference, with faintly ironical curiosity; again, as when they had
first begun to talk together; and yet again, when he had found himself
resorting to all manner of cowardly mental expedients to persuade
himself that he did not revel in her dangerously winning attractiveness,
and sweet sympathetic converse. In the monotonous three-four time beat
of the wheels he could conjure up her voice--even the colonial trick of
clipping the final "r" in words ending with that letter--as to which he
had often rallied her, while secretly liking it--for this, like a touch
of the brogue, can be winsome enough when uttered by pretty lips. Now
all these reflections could not but be profitless, possibly dangerous,
yet they had this advantage--they helped to kill time, and that during a
thirty-odd-hour journey across the Karroo. Well, it is an advantage!

On through the long, hot day, and still that memory was with him. The
solitude, the stillness, the mile after mile over the desolate and
barren waste, the novelty of the scene, the monotonous rattle of the
wheels--all went to perpetuate it. Then the sun drew down to the
horizon, and the departing glow, striking upon the red soil, painted the
latter the colour of blood, making up an extraordinarily vivid study in
red and blue. Overhead a cloudless sky, the horizon all aflame, and the
whole earth, far as the