s a note of hysteria.
Fear had made harsh the velvet woman's tones. Fear, and a rising
resentment against the cruel sentence that had been passed upon her.

She crouched down, rocking herself amidst a low scrub upon which the
dead leaves still hung where the fires had scorched them. But the fire
had not actually passed over them. A wide spread of barren rock
intervened between the now skeleton woods and where the girl sat
huddled.

In front of her lay the figure of a man, disheveled and bleeding, and
scarcely recognizable for the staunch youth who had yielded himself to
the buffets of life that the woman he loved might be spared.

But Joan only saw the radiant young face she loved, the slim, graceful
figure so full of life and strength. He was hers. And--and death had
snatched him from her. Death had claimed him, when all that she could
ever long for seemed to be within her grasp. Death, ruthless, fierce,
hateful death had crushed out that life in its cruellest, most
merciless fashion.

She saw nothing of the ruin which lay about her. She had no thought of
anything else, she had no thought of those others. All she knew was
that her Buck, her brave Buck, lay before her--dead.

The girl suddenly turned her despairing eyes to the white heavens,
their deep blue depths turned to a wonderful violet of emotion. Her
wealth of golden hair hung loose about her shoulders, trailing about
her on the sodden earth, where it had fallen in the midst of the
disaster that had come upon her. Her rounded young figure was bent
like the figure of an aged woman, and the drawn lines of anguish on
her beautiful face gave her an age she did not possess.

"Oh, he is not dead!" she cried, in a vain appeal. "Tell me he is not
dead!" she cried, to the limitless space beyond the clouds. "He is all
I have, all I have in the world. Oh, God, have mercy upon me! Have
mercy!"

Her only reply was the stillness. The stillness as of death. She
raised her hands to her face. There were no tears. She was beyond that
poor comfort. Dry, hard sobs racked her body, and drove the rising
fever to her poor brain.

For long moments she remained thus.

Then, after a while, her sobs ceased and she became quite still. She
dropped her hands inertly from her face, and let them lie in her lap,
nerveless, helpless, while she gazed upon the well-loved features, so
pale under the grime and tanning of the skin.

She sat quite still for many minutes. It almost seemed