udith bent
over the rocky ledge and saw a girl making her way down the game trail,
dishevelled and tearful. Her hat was gone, her pale-yellow hair, that in
shadow had the greenish tinge of corn-silk, blew about her shoulders, her
trim skirt was torn and dusty, and she looked about, bewildered, hardly
realizing that through the unexpected course of things she had been
stranded in this great world of sunlit splendor and loneliness. She closed
her eyes. The awful vastness and solitude oppressed her with a deepening
sense of calamity. Suppose they never found her? How could she find her
way in this endless wilderness, afoot? She sank to the turf and began to
cry hysterically.

Judith knew in a flash of instant cognition that this was Miss Colebrooke.
Amazement seemed to have dulled her powers of action--amazement that she,
who had stolen to this place and crouched close to earth that she might
see the triumph of this preferred woman, and, having seen and paid her
grievous dole, steal away and take up the thread of endless little things
that spun for her the web of life, was forced instead to be an unwilling
witness of the other's distress. Judith had risen with her first impulse,
which had been to go to Kitty, but half-way through the thicket she
hesitated and reconsidered. Undoubtedly Peter would come soon, and Peter's
consolation would be more potent than any she could offer. She shrank in
shuddering self-consciousness at the thought of her presence at their
meeting, the uninvited guest, the outgrown friend and confidante,
blundering in at such a time, pitifully full of good intentions. She
recoiled from the picture as from a precipice that all unwittingly she had
escaped. What madness had induced her to come on this expedition? A sudden
panic at the possibility of discovery possessed her; suppose Peter should
find her skulking like a beggar, waiting for broken meats? She looked at
the image of herself that she carried in her heart. It was that of a proud
woman who made no moan at the scourge of the inevitable. Many burdens had
she carried in her proud, lonely heart, but of them her lips gave no sign.
In her contemplative stoicism she felt with pride that she was no unworthy
daughter of her mother's people, and catching a glimpse through the trees
of the abjectly waiting woman who, though safe and sound, could but wait,
wretched and dispirited, for some one to come and adjust her to the
situation, Judith felt for her a won