itself; to wit,
By its fruit: the thing it does."
--Browning.

Quita lacked courage to appear again in public till the dinner bugle
sounded. Garth was her promised partner: and she found him awaiting
her just outside her tent.

"My turn now, dear lady," he said, pressing her fingertips against his
side, as she took his proffered arm. "It has been a blank afternoon
for me; but in revenge, I mean to keep you all the evening."

"You are presumptuous, as always!" she answered with admirable
lightness. "Your claim ends with dessert."

"Quite so. But you are generous; and I can trust the rest to you,
since you know how much I want it."

She smiled, as in duty bound. But to-night the man's facile gallantry
revolted her as it had never yet done. She wondered how she had
endured it these many months.

The instant they entered the long tent her eyes sought and found the
thing they craved: though the sight of Lenox in his accustomed place
between the Desmonds reawakened her smouldering jealousy of Honor, and
gave the lie to her amazing instant of revelation. But once during the
meal she encountered her husband's eyes. It was as if he had put out a
hand and touched her; and her partner's veiled love-making became a
meaningless murmur at her ear. Yet the surface of her brain travelled
mechanically along the beaten track of dinner-table talk: and Garth,
finding her gentler and more serious than her wont, deemed his hour of
triumph very near at hand. Direct encouragement, in the face of his
hidden knowledge, had strengthened his conviction that for many weeks
she had been stifling her true feelings; that one touch at the right
moment would suffice to lift the veil, to bring her at last into his
arms. Beyond that moment of mastery he did not choose to look. For
to-night passion had elbowed prudence out of the field. He had claimed
her for the evening; and he anticipated great things from the next two
hours under the stars.

At these informal camp dinners men and women left the table together;
only habitual card-players remaining behind to tempt fortune until the
small hours. Quita's hope had been that Desmond might come to her aid.
But he had made up a rubber of whist; and to her dismay, she saw Lenox
and Honor depart without him. Garth, who also noted their movements,
carefully led her round to the far side of a blazing bonfire, piled ten
feet high on this last night of Arcadia; and with a suppresse