at the
tent entrance watched the advance of the little company indifferently,
it seemed; except for a slight tightening of the muscles about her
mouth, her face remained unchanged. While he was still some little
distance away, the man with the notebook raised his head and smiled
awkwardly as he saw her standing there. Awkwardness, perhaps, best
describes the whole man. He was badly put together, loose-jointed,
ungainly. The fact that he was tall profited him nothing, for it merely
emphasised the extreme ungracefulness of his figure. His long pale face
was made paler by the shock of coarse, tow-coloured hair; his
eyes, even, looked colourless, though they were certainly the least
uninteresting feature of his face, for they were not devoid of
expression. He had a way of slouching when he moved that singularly
intensified the general uncouthness of his appearance. "Are you very
tired?" asked his wife, gently, when he had dismounted close to the
tent. The question would have been an unnecessary one had it been put
to her instead of to her husband, for her voice had that peculiar flat
toneless sound for which extreme weariness is answerable.

"Well, no, my dear, not very," he replied, drawling out the words with
an exasperating air of delivering a final verdict, after deep reflection
on the subject.

The girl glanced once more at the fading colours on the hills. "Come in
and rest," she said, moving aside a little to let him pass.

She stood lingering a moment after he had entered the tent, as though
unwilling to leave the outer air; and before she turned to follow him
she drew a deep breath, and her hand went for one swift second to her
throat as though she felt stifled.

Later on that evening she sat in her tent, sewing by the light of the
lamp that stood on her little table.

Opposite to her, her husband stretched his ungainly length in a
deck-chair, and turned over a pile of official notes. Every now and
then her eyes wandered from the gay silks of the table-cover she was
embroidering to the canvas walls which bounded the narrow space into
which their few household goods were crowded. Outside there was a deep
hush. The silence of the vast empty plain seemed to work its way slowly,
steadily in toward the little patch of light set in its midst. The girl
felt it in every nerve; it was as though some soft-footed, noiseless,
shapeless creature, whose presence she only dimly divined, was
approaching nearer--_nearer_. The