ievable as it may
seem, for the first time in her existence she had aroused to the
consciousness of being an individual entity. The inevitable
metamorphosis of age, the thing which differentiates a child from an
adult, belated long in her passive life, had at last taken place.
Bewilderingly sudden, so sudden that as yet she had not adjusted herself
to the change, had barely become conscious thereof, yet certain as
existence itself, the transformation had come to pass. Looking back
there that afternoon, looking where the town had been and now was not,
mingling with the impressions of a day full to overflowing, there came
to the girl for the first time a definite appreciation of this thing
that she had done. And that moment from the scene, never to appear
again, passed Bess Landor the child; and invisibly into her place,
taking up the play where the other had left, came Elizabeth Landor the
woman.

Very, very long the girl sat there so; unconsciously long. With the
swift reaction of youth, the scene of the excitement vanished, the
personal menace gone, the impression it had made passed promptly into
abeyance. As when she and the man had sat alone in the tiny room of the
hotel, another consideration was too insistent, too vital, to prevent
dominating the moment. Any other diversion, save absolute physical pain
itself, would have been inadequate, was inadequate. Gradually, minute by
minute, as the outline of the town itself had vanished, the depressing
impression of that jeering frontier mob faded; and in its stead, looming
bigger and bigger, advancing, enfolding like a storm cloud until it
blotted out every other thought, came realisation of the thing she had
done: came appreciation of its finality, its immensity. Then it was that
the infinite bigness of this uninhabited wild, the sense of its infinite
loneliness, pressed her close. Despite herself, against all reason, as a
child is afraid of the dark there grew upon her a terror of this
intangible thing called solitude that stretched out into the future
endlessly. Smiling as it was this day, unchangeably smiling, she fancied
a time when it would not smile, when its passive eventless monotony
would be maddening. Swiftly, cumulatively as with every intense nature
impressions reproduce, this one augmented. Again into the consideration
intruded the absolute finality, the irrevocability of her choice. More
distinctly than when she had listened to the original, memory recalled