her path! What would she say? What would she do?
What could be said or done? Bitterness and resentment and dark
suspicion were in her mind--and in his. Her pride was less wilful and
tempestuous than on the day when she drove him from her; when he said
things which flayed her soul, and left her body as though it had been
beaten with rods. Her bitterness, her resentment had its origin in the
fact that he did not understand--and yet in his crude big way he had
really understood better than Ian Stafford. She felt that Rudyard
despised her now a thousand times more than ever he had hinted at in
that last stifling scene in Park Lane; and her spirit rebelled against
it. She would rather that he had believed everything against her, and
had made an open scandal, because then she could have paid any debt due
to him by the penalty most cruel a woman can bear. But pity,
concession, the condescension of a superior morality, were impossible
to her proud mind.

As for Ian Stafford, he had left her stripped bare of one single
garment of self-respect. His very kindness, his chivalry in defending
her; his inflexible determination that all should be over between them
forever, that she should be prevailed upon to be to Rudyard more than
she had ever been--it all drove her into a deeper isolation. This
isolation would have been her destruction but that something bigger
than herself, a passion to do things, lifted to idealism a mind which
in the past had grown materialistic, which, in gaining wit and mental
skill, had missed the meaning of things, the elemental sense.

Corporal Shorter's tale of Rudyard's heroism had stirred her; but she
could not have said quite what her feeling was with regard to it. She
only knew vaguely that she was glad of it in a more personal than
impersonal way. When she shook hands with the cheerful non-com. at the
door of the hospital, she gave him a piece of gold which he was loth to
accept till she said: "But take it as a souvenir of Colonel Byng's
little ride with 'Old Gunter.'"

With a laugh, he took it then, and replied, "I'll not smoke it, I'll
not eat it, and I'll not drink it. I'll wear it for luck and
God-bless-you!"

CHAPTER XXXI

THE GREY HORSE AND ITS RIDER

It was almost midnight. The camp was sleeping. The forces of
destruction lay torpid in the starry shadow of the night. There was no
moon, but the stars gave a light that relieved the gloom. They were so
near to the eye that it might