Perhaps he did not quite know
how accurate his guess was, and how true the conclusion he drew from it.
Certainly she had been dreaming, and she was an odd woman.

Meanwhile Jess was rapidly changing her clothes and removing the traces
of her struggle with the elements. But of that other struggle she had
gone through she could not remove the traces. They and the love that
arose out of it would endure as long as she endured. It was her former
self that had been cast off in it and which now lay behind her, an empty
and unmeaning thing like the shapeless heap of garments. It was all very
strange. So John had gone to look for her and had not found her. She was
glad that he had gone. It made her happy to think of him searching
and calling in the wet and the night. She was only a woman, and it was
natural that she should feel thus. By-and-by he would come back and find
her clothed and in her right mind and ready to greet him. She was glad
that he had not seen her wet and dishevelled. A girl looks so unpleasant
like that. It might have set him against her. Men like women to look
nice and clean and pretty. That gave her an idea. She turned to her
glass and, holding the light above her head, studied her own face
attentively. She was a woman with as little vanity in her composition as
it is possible for a woman to have, and till now she had not given her
personal looks much consideration. They had not been of great importance
to her in the Wakkerstroom district of the Transvaal. But to-night all
of a sudden they became very important; and so she stood and looked at
her own wonderful eyes, at the masses of curling brown hair still damp
and shining from the rain, at the curious pallid face and clear-cut
determined mouth.

"If it were not for my eyes and hair, I should be very ugly," she said
to herself aloud. "If only I were beautiful like Bessie, now." The
thought of her sister gave her another idea. What if John were to prefer
Bessie? Now she remembered that he had been very attentive to Bessie.
A feeling of dreadful doubt and jealousy passed through her, for women
like Jess know what jealousy is in its bitterness. Supposing that it was
in vain, supposing that what she had given to-day--given utterly once
and for all, so that she could not take it back--had been given to a man
who loved another woman, and that woman her own dear sister! Supposing
that the fate of her love was to be like water falling unalteringly
on the hard rock