return. Never once during the day was
there a sudden or unexpected sound, whether the snapping of a burning
faggot or the scratching against the rock of a log rolling apart, or the
flap of her canvas, that she did not look expectantly toward the rude
door through which she thought to see him returning.

Once that her restlessness came upon her she could not remain quiet. She
drew on her boots and walked up and down, casting fearsome glances
toward the darkest portion of the cavern, shunning it, keeping the fire
between it and herself. When she peered out across the desolate world
she drew back from its bleak menace, shuddering, returning to crouch
miserably by her fire, shut in between two frightful things, the black
unknown of the bowels of the cave, the white horror of the brutal,
insensate wilderness. And, in her almost hysterical emotional frenzy she
saw back of each of them the man, Mark King, as though they were but the
expressions of his own brutality.

After an hour she felt that she would go mad unless she found something
to hold her mind back from those hideous channels into which it slipped
so readily. She snatched up the book which King had left with her, and
forced herself to read. Pages eluded her, but here and there single
lines or words caught her attention as a thorny copse catches and plucks
the garments of one going blindly through it. So she was arrested by the
line: "_In simpleness and gentleness and honour and clean mirth_." And
this was one of the times when she threw the book down and got up and
walked back and forth impatiently. It was almost as though King had left
the wretched volume behind to be his spokesman in his absence; she told
herself angrily that he was _not_ like that, had never been like that.
He was a mere brute of a man, not "_such as fought and sailed and ruled
and loved and made our world_." He was, rather, unthinkably crude and
boorish and detestable.

But, rebelling at utter loneliness, she was forced again and again to
the only companion at hand. She read _The Explorer_, fascinated in a
shivery, uncanny way by the first line, as though a ghostly voice were
whispering to her from the black corners of the cave: "_There's no sense
in going further--it's the edge of cultivation._" And later: "_I faced
the sheer main-ranges, whipping up and leading down._" Others than she
had gone into the last solitudes. Others who had joyed in it and sung of
it! It was as though the dead shad