face.

Quamina looks up proudly, delightedly.

"I have placed food and drink in the rock away from the roadside," she
replies chuckling. "He will be busy eating, and never see the Sahib
riding up the path. Quamina loves the Sahib and his white lady; she
will provide for the devil."

Eleanor shrugs her shoulders in sheer despair. She cannot bring this
woman to reason. With a pitying smile she returns to the window, and
buries her fingers in the soft silk of those yellow pillows with an
almost frantic clutch. They are just like the sofa cushions at
Lyndhurst. Philip, perhaps, is lounging on them now, or Erminie--he
has given them to Mrs. Lane for her new drawing-room.

She kneels for a while on the lounge, and though there is no sound her
lips move.

Thus she stays, directly opposite the open window, listening and
looking, wondering and praying.

Can some evil have befallen him? She remembers his displeasure when
she rode out to meet him that night--the man with the black mask.

There is a loud report in the room; she springs to her feet with a cry.
It is only a string of her guitar which has broken, and she sinks back
into the old attitude despairingly.

Quamina is pounding rice in the kitchen. Eleanor calls to her to stop.
She fancies the sound may prevent her hearing the first fall of a
horse's hoofs in the distance, for the moon has not risen yet, and she
cannot see far.

So she remains perfectly still, waiting for the pale light to rise in
the heavens, while crowds of unutterable fancies rush through her
brain--a mad disorder of thought.

She stares outwards, as one in the fetters of an awful dream.

"Why does he not come to her?"

Some well-known words recur to her brain. "The eye, like a shattered
mirror, multiplies the images of its sorrow, and sees, in innumerable
far-off places, the woe which is close at hand."

There is a hot and heavy vapour in the air--it seems to poison Eleanor
as she inhales it in her lungs. A settled apathy pervades her spirit.
For some moments she feels nothing, has not a thought--only a strange
ringing in her head. The landscape before her looks desolate and
terrible, an unredeemed dreariness darkens her soul like a London
fog--thick, stifling.

London! The word recalls Philip, the man whose home she shattered,
whose life she ruined--for Carol's sake. It was easy to deal the blow,
to forget the world, to forfeit her good name when love's overpowering
fasci