vious; finding it an intellectual environment that
demands no slightest expenditure of mental energy or initiative,
strength to sally forth again into the unfamiliar.

I crave pardon for this digression. I set it down because now I remember
how, when Drake at last broke the silence that had closed in upon
the passing of that still, small voice the essence of these thoughts
occurred to me.

He strode over to the weeping girl, and in his voice was a roughness
that angered me until I realized his purpose.

"Get up, Ruth," he ordered. "He came back once and he'll come back
again. Now let him be and help us get a meal together. I'm hungry."

She looked up at him, incredulously, indignation rising.

"Eat!" she exclaimed. "You can be hungry?"

"You bet I can--and I am," he answered cheerfully. "Come on; we've got
to make the best of it."

"Ruth," I broke in gently, "we'll all have to think about ourselves a
little if we're to be of any use to him. You must eat--and then rest."

"No use crying in the milk even if it's spilt," observed Drake, even
more cheerfully brutal. "I learned that at the front where we got so
we'd yelp for food even when the lads who'd been bringing it were all
mixed up in it."

She lifted Ventnor's head from her lap, rested it on the silks; arose,
eyes wrathful, her little hands closed in fists as though to strike him.

"Oh--you brute!" she whispered. "And I thought--I thought--Oh, I hate
you!"

"That's better," said Dick. "Go ahead and hit me if you want. The madder
you get the better you'll feel."

For a moment I thought she was going to take him at his word; then her
anger fled.

"Thanks--Dick," she said quietly.

And while I sat studying Ventnor, they put together a meal from the
stores, brewed tea over the spirit-lamp with water from the bubbling
spring. In these commonplaces I knew that she at least was finding
relief from that strain of the abnormal under which we had labored so
long. To my surprise I found that I was hungry, and with deep relief I
watched Ruth partake of food and drink even though lightly.

About her seemed to hover something of the ethereal, elusive, and
disquieting. Was it the strangely pellucid light that gave the effect, I
wondered; and knew it was not, for as I scanned her covertly, there
fell upon her face that shadow of inhuman tranquillity, of unearthly
withdrawal which, I guessed, had more than anything else maddened
Ventnor into his attack upon the Dis