"Get past her, please," she said coldly. "I object to other people's
dust."

Druro was about to object in his turn, though, for a moment, he
philandered with the delightful thought of getting even with Gay by
covering her with dust and petrol fumes. Unfortunately, his gallant
resistance to this pleasant temptation would never be known, for Gay
suddenly and unexpectedly wheeled to the left and put her horse's head
to the veld. The swift wheeling movement, with its attendant extra
scuffling of dust, sent a further graceful contribution of fine dirt on
to the occupants of the car. It would have been difficult to accuse
Gay of doing it on purpose, however, for she appeared blandly
unconscious of the neighbourhood of fellow beings. She gave a little
flick of her whip, and away she went over a great burnt-out patch of
veld, leaving the long, white, dusty road to those who had no choice
but to take it.

Mrs. Hading did not love Gay Liscannon any better for her score, but
she would have disliked her in any case. Because she was no longer
young herself, youth drove at her heart like a poisoned dagger. One of
the few keen pleasures she had left in life was to bare her foils to
the attack of some inexperienced girl, to match her wit and art and
beauty against a fresh cheek and ingenuous heart, and prove to the
world that victory was still to her. But when she had done it, victory
was dust in her palm and bitter in her mouth as dead-sea apples. For
she knew that the wolf of middle age was at her door.

Marice Hading was one of those unhappy women who have drained to the
dregs every cup of pleasure they can wrench from life and fled from the
healing cup of pain. Now, with the chilly and uncompromising hand of
forty clutching at her, pain was always with her--not ennobling,
chastening pain, but the pain of those who, having been overfull, must
henceforth go empty.

Small wonder that, weary-eyed and dry-souled, she roamed the earth in
feverish search of solace and refreshment. Her husband, a generous,
affectionate man, condemned by her selfishness to a waste of arid years
empty of wife-love or children, had died of overwork, dyspepsia, and
general dissatisfaction some eight years before, leaving his widow with
an income of two thousand pounds a year, a sum she found all too small
for her requirements.

In her fashion, she had been in love several times during her
widowhood, but never sufficiently so to surrender her l