ng better to do, she watched its advance. It fell upon a tiny
shelf against the wall, littered with a collection of papers and
magazines; and the reflected light from the white sheets glared in her
eyes. It came to the supper table of the night before, the table she had
not cleared, and like an accusing hand, lay directed at the evidence of
her own slothfulness. On it went with the passing time, on and on;
crossed a bare spot on the uncarpeted floor, and like a live thing,
began climbing the wall beyond.

Deliberately, with a sort of fascination now, the girl watched its
advance. Her nerves were on edge this morning, and in its relentless
stealth it began to assume an element of the uncanny. Like a hostile
alien thing, it seemed searching here and there in the tiny room for
something definite, something it did not find. Fatuous as it may seem,
the impression grew upon her, augmented until in its own turn it became
a dominant influence. Her glance, heretofore absent, perfunctory, became
intense. The glare was well above the floor by this time and climbing
higher and higher. Answering the mythical challenge, of a sudden she sat
up free in bed and, as though at a spoken injunction, looked about her
fairly.

The place where she glanced, the point toward which the light was
mounting, was beside her own bed and where, from rough-fashioned wooden
pegs, hung the Indian's pathetically scant wardrobe. At first glance
there seemed to the girl nothing unusual revealed thereon, nothing
significant; and, restlessly observant, the inspection advanced. Then,
ere the mental picture could vanish, ere a new impression could take its
place, in a flash of tardy recollection and of understanding came
realisation complete, and her eyes returned. For perhaps a minute
thereafter she sat so, her great eyes unconsciously opening wider and
wider, her brown skin shading paler second by second. A minute so, a
minute of nerve-tense inaction; then with a little gesture of weariness
and of abandon absolute, she dropped back in her place, and covered her
face from sight.

CHAPTER XVII

SACRIFICE

A week had gone by. Each day of the seven the thoroughbred with the
slender legs and the tiny sensitive ears had stood in the barren
dooryard before Elizabeth Landor's home. Moreover, with each repetition
the arrival had been earlier, the halt longer. Though the weather was
perfect, nevertheless the beast had grown impatient under the long
waits,