ed her an opportunity of reading Mr.
Quayle a, perhaps useful, lesson. Her serious eyes narrowed, and her
upper lip shortened into a delightful smile.

"Hopeless, Dr. Knott!" she answered. "To begin with he'll never ask me,
since we like each other very royally ill. And to end with--" she
carefully avoided sight of Mr. Quayle--"I--you see--I'm not what you
call a marrying man."

CHAPTER V

EXIT CAMP

About twenty minutes later the young lady, still booted and spurred,
opened the door which leads from the Chapel-Room into Lady Calmady's
bedchamber. As she did so a gentle warmth met her, along with a
sweetness of flowers. Within, the melancholy of the bleak twilight was
mitigated by the soft brightness of a pink-shaded lamp, and a fitful
flickering of firelight. This last, playing upon the blue-and-white,
Dutch tiling of the hearth and chimney-space conferred a quaint effect
of activity upon the actors in the biblical scenes thereon depicted.
The patriarch Abraham visibly flourished his two-inch sword above the
prostrate form of hapless Isaac. The elders pranced, unblushingly, in
pursuit of the chaste Susanna. While poor little Tobit, fish in hand,
clung anxiously to the flying draperies of his long-legged, and
all-too-peripatetic, guardian angel. Such profane vivacity, on the part
of persons usually accounted sacred, offered marked an almost cynical
contrast to the extreme quiet otherwise obtaining, accentuated the
absoluteness, deepened the depth, of it. For nothing stirred within the
length and breadth of the room, nor did any smallest sound disturb the
prevailing silence. At these southward-facing casements no harsh wind
shrilled. The embroidered curtains of the state-bed hung in stiff,
straight folds. The many-coloured leaves and branches of the trees of
the Forest of This Life were motionless. Care, the Leopard, crouched,
unobservant, forgetful to spring, while the Hart was fixed spellbound
in the midst of its headlong flight. A spell seemed, indeed, to rest on
all things, which had in it more than the watchful hush of the ordinary
sickroom. It suggested a certain moral attitude--a quiet, not
acquiesced in merely, but promoted.

Upon Honoria--her circulation quickened by recent exercise, her cheeks
still tingling from the stinging sleet, her retina still retaining
impressions of the stern grandeur of the wide-ranging fir woods and
gray-brown desolation of the moors--this extreme quiet produced an
extr