assumed, however, a tone almost brusque, artificially airy and
unimportant.

"There, that will do, thank you.... We have become serious and
incomprehensible. Let us talk of other things. I want to be gay....
Amuse me."

Arrived at the hotel, she told Justine that she must not be disturbed
till near dinner-time, and withdrew to her sitting-room. There she sat
and thought, as she had never done in her life before. She thought upon
everything that had happened since the day when she met Galt Roscoe on
the 'Fulvia'; of a certain evening in England, before he took orders,
when he told her, in retort to some peculiarly cutting remark of hers,
that she was the evil genius of his life: that evening when her heart
grew hard, as she had once said it should always be to him, and she
determined again, after faltering many times, that just such a genius
she would be; of the strange meeting in the rapids at the Devil's Slide,
and the irony of it; and the fact that he had saved her life--on
that she paused a while; of Ruth Devlin--and here she was swayed by
conflicting emotions; of the scene at the mill, and Phil Boldrick's
death and funeral; of the service in the church where she meant to mock
him, and, instead, mocked herself; of the meeting with Tonga Sam; of all
that Justine had said to her: then again of the far past in Samoa, with
which Galt Roscoe was associated, and of that first vow of vengeance for
a thing he had done; and how she had hesitated to fulfil it year after
year till now.

Passing herself slowly back and forth before her eyes, she saw that she
had lived her life almost wholly alone; that no woman had ever cherished
her as a friend, and that on no man's breast had she ever laid her head
in trust and love. She had been loved, but it had never brought her
satisfaction. From Justine there was devotion; but it had, as she
thought, been purchased, paid for, like the labour of a ploughboy.
And if she saw now in Justine's eyes a look of friendship, a note of
personal allegiance, she knew it was because she herself had grown more
human.

Her nature had been stirred. Her natural heart was struggling against
her old bitterness towards Galt Roscoe and her partial hate of Ruth
Devlin. Once Roscoe had loved her, and she had not loved him. Then, on a
bitter day for him, he did a mad thing. The thing became--though neither
of them knew it at the time, and he not yet--a great injury to her, and
this had called for the sharp r