aven't been in this burnt-up spot as many hours as
you've had months of it."

She smiled a little.

"You must learn to possess your soul in patience," she said, and glanced
inconsequently from Broomhurst to her husband, and then dropped her eyes
and was silent a moment.

John was obviously, and a little audibly, enjoying his dinner. He sat
with his chair pushed close to the table, and his elbows awkwardly
raised, swallowing his soup in gulps. He grasped his spoon tightly in
his bony hand, so that its swollen joints stood out larger and uglier
than ever, his wife thought.

Her eyes wandered to Broomhurst's hands. They were well shaped, and,
though not small, there was a look of refinement about them; he had a
way of touching things delicately, a little lingeringly, she noticed.
There was an air of distinction about his clear-cut, clean-shaven face,
possibly intensified by contrast with Drayton's blurred features; and it
was, perhaps, also by contrast with the gray cuffs that showed beneath
John's ill-cut drab suit that the linen Broomhurst wore seemed to her
particularly spotless.

Broomhurst's thoughts, for his part, were a good deal occupied with his
hostess.

She was pretty, he thought, or perhaps it was that, with the wide,
dry lonely plain as a setting, her fragile delicacy of appearance was
invested with a certain flower-like charm.

"The silence here seems rather strange, rather appalling at first, when
one is fresh from a town," he pursued, after a moment's pause; "but I
suppose you're used to it, eh, Drayton? How do _you_ find life here,
Mrs. Drayton?" he asked, a little curiously, turning to her as he spoke.

She hesitated a second. "Oh, much the same as I should find it anywhere
else, I expect," she replied; "after all, one carries the possibilities
of a happy life about with one; don't you think so? The Garden of Eden
wouldn't necessarily make my life any happier, or less happy, than a
howling wilderness like this. It depends on one's self entirely."

"Given the right Adam and Eve, the desert blossoms like the rose, in
fact," Broomhurst answered, lightly, with a smiling glance inclusive of
husband and wife; "you two don't feel as though you'd been driven out of
Paradise, evidently."

Drayton raised his eyes from his plate with a smile of total
incomprehension.

"Great heavens! what an Adam to select!" thought Broomhurst,
involuntarily, as Mrs. Drayton rose rather suddenly from the table.

"I'l