her words
impatiently. She was racked with anxiety at his long delay, and now she
hung over Kitty, waiting for her answer, without the semblance of a cloak
for her alarm.

There was reproof in Kitty's amendment. "I don't know which way Mr.
Hamilton's horse went. It started back over the trail, I think."

Judith clasped her hands. "Let us go and look for him. Why do we waste
time?" But Kitty hung back. She was shaken from her fall, and upset by the
events of the morning. Besides, her faith in Peter's ability to cope with
all the exigencies of this country was supreme. And chiefest reason of all
for her not going was a something within her that winced at the thought of
this fellowship that had for its object the quest of Peter.

"Oh, don't you see," pleaded Judith, "that if something had not happened
to him he would have been here long ago?"

Judith's anxiety awoke in Kitty a new consciousness. What was she to him,
that at the possibility of harm, a fear not shared by Kitty, she should
throw off a reserve that every line of her face pronounced habitual? In
her very energy of attitude, an energy that all unconsciously communicated
itself to Kitty, there was the power that belongs to all elemental human
emotion--the power that compels. Kitty rose to follow Judith, then
hesitated.

"I'm sure nothing has happened him. No, I'm really too unstrung by my fall
to walk." She sank again to the bowlder on which she had been sitting.

To the woman of the world, Judith's ingenuous display of feeling had in
its very sincerity a something pitiable. How could she strip from her soul
every fold of reserve and stand unloved and unashamed, sanctified, as it
were, by the very hopelessness of her passion? How could women make of
their whole existence a thing to be rejected, reflected Kitty, who, giving
nothing, could not understand. She looked again at the bronzed face beside
her, so bold in outline, so expressive in detail. Yes, she was beautiful,
and yet, what had her beauty availed her? The thought that she herself was
the preferred woman throbbed through her for a moment with a sense of
exaltation. The next moment a haunting doubt laid hold of her heart, held
up mockingly the little that she and Peter had lived through together, the
lofty plane of friendship along which she had tried to lead his unwilling
feet sedately, his protests, his frank amusement at her serious
pretensions to a career. How much fuller might not have been the