ure with and disdain of Tryon by sitting half turned and
conversing with Druro, who was obliged to lean forward uncomfortably to
answer her remarks. But she soon tired of this, for the strong wind
caused by the car cutting through the air tore her flatly arranged hair
from its appointed place and blew it over her eyes in thin black
strings. This enraged her, as the dishevelment of a carefully arranged
coiffure always enrages a fashionable woman. She loathed wind at any
time; it always aroused seven devils in her. She longed to box Tryon's
ears. But the best she could do was to sit in haughty silence at his
side, while the wind took the long ends of her scented tulle scarf and
tore it to rags, fluttering them maliciously in the faces of the two
silent ones behind. Every now and then Druro mechanically caught hold
of these ends, crumpled them into a bunch, and stuffed them behind Mrs.
Hading's shoulders, but a few minutes later they would be loose again,
whipping the wind. Once, when he was catching the flickering things
from Gay's face, his hand touched her cheek, and once, when they both
put out their hands together, they clasped each other's fingers instead
of the fragile stuff. But they never spoke. And their silence at last
began to weigh on the two in front. They found themselves straining
their ears to hear if those two would ever murmur a word to each other.
And if they did not, _why didn't they_?

"Has he got his arm round her?" wondered Tryon savagely. (He too had
counted on tonight and the long, lonely drive with Gay, and was in none
too pleasant a mood with life.)

"Is he holding her hand?" thought Marice Hading, and ground her teeth.
"Has there ever been anything between them?"

But Druro and Gay were doing none of these things--only sitting very
still, and thinking long, long thoughts. And whatever it was they
thought of, it put no gladness into their eyes. Any one who could have
peered into their faces in the pale moonlight must have been struck by
the similarity in the expression of their eyes, the vague, staring
misery of those who search the horizon vainly for something that will
never be theirs, some lost city from which they are for ever exiled.

The African horizon was wonderfully beautiful that night. As they came
out from the miles of bush which surround Wankelo into the
hill-and-valley lands of Selukine, the moon burst in pearly splendour
from her fleecy wrappings of cloud and show