he sat there
satiating his eyes with this vision of a most entrancing embodiment of
deception, the while mechanically sustaining his share or the
conversation.

The saloon was brilliant with light and life, cheerful with voices, for
the crowded diners had now found their tongues, presumably about halfway
down the gradually decreasing bottles. Laughter?--Oh yes, plenty of
that--airy feminine laughter--with the explosive male guffaw. Knives
and forks clattered, corks popped. Oh, plenty of light and life here;
but without--the dark waters, deep and wide, the dim expanse of
unfathomable ocean lying black beneath the stars. "For ever--in life
and in death."

"And how many big nuggets did you pick up on the gold-fields, Musgrave?"
said the captain presently.

"Nuggets? Fever's more plentiful around there than nuggets, and dust
than gold-dust," answered Roden wearily. "The place is a fraud."

His _vis-a-vis_ was watching him now. Yet the feeling which she had so
valiantly repressed came near overpowering her once more, as she noted
the change which had crept over his appearance. He seemed to have aged,
to have grown leaner and browner, as though he had gone through a hard,
hard struggle, bodily and mental, of late. And from the bronzed
complexion, wind-swept, sun-tanned by months of open-air life, of toil
and exposure, the strange double scar seemed thrown out more prominent,
more livid than ever. It was marvellous, well-nigh miraculous, that
they should have met again thus.

She too showed traces of the struggle. There was a tired, wistful look
about the eyes, the suspicion of a melancholy droop at the corners of
the mouth, which imparted to her face a very different expression to
that of the self-loving, self-indulgent, and rather heartless Mona whom
he had first beheld reclining easily, sensuously, in her hammock under
the green willows at Quaggasfontein, now more than a year ago. Had she
too suffered? Why then had she been found so lamentably wanting when
put to the ordeal? Surely a nature which had proved so weak could have
no great capacity for suffering, at any rate, for any length of time.
No, it was all a most miserable mistake, all too late. This wonderfully
unexpected meeting had shaken him more than he cared to allow. The
wound, barely skinned over during these six months or so, now broke open
again and bled afresh--bled copiously. More careless, more terse became
the tone of his conversation