resently, she too was to give
and to give unstintedly: new strength and skill seemed already tingling
in her firm, quick hands; new vigor and inspiration stirred in her
eager brain--and both hands and brain were to be her share of
giving--her partnership offering in this pact of theirs. She was eager,
eager to begin.

But already they had been four days in camp without a beginning. So far
they had not even looked for the trail which was to lead them to the
cabin of Hawk-Eye Charlie whose store of Indian lore had been the
reason for their upcoast journey. This delay of the expeditionary party
was due to no fault of its secretary. During the past four days she had
proposed the search for the trail four times, one proposal per day. And
each day the chief expeditioner had voted a postponement. The chief
expeditioner was lazy. At least that was the excuse he made. And
Desire, who was not lazy, might have fretted at the inaction had she
believed him. But she knew it was not laziness which had drawn certain
new lines about the expeditioner's mouth and deepened the old ones on
his forehead. It was not laziness which lay behind the strained look in
his eyes and the sudden return of his almost vanished limp. These
things are not symptoms of indolence. They are symptoms of nerves. And
Desire knew something of nerves. What she did not know, in the present
case, was their exciting cause. Neither could she understand this new
reticence on the part of their victim nor his reluctance to admit the
obvious. She puzzled much about these problems while the lazy one
rested in the sun and the quiet, golden days wrought the magic of their
cure.

And Spence, mere man that he was, fancied that she noticed nothing. The
pleasant illusion hastened his recovery. It tended to restore a
complacency, rudely disturbed by an enforced realization of his own
back-sliding. He had been quite furious upon discovering that the
"little episode" of the moonlit cottage had filched from him all his
new won strength and nervous stamina, leaving him sleepless and
unstrung, ready to jump at the rattling of a stone. More and more,
there grew in him a fierce disdain of weakness and a cold determination
to beat Nature at her own game. Let him once again be "fit" and wily
indeed would be the trick which would steal his fitness from him.

Meanwhile, laziness was as good a camouflage as anything and lying on
the grass while Desire chose her name was pleasant in the ext