Ora looked round the large living-room of her bungalow with a deep sense of content. The walls were covered with a material coarse in weave and of a red warm but not too bright. The colour was repeated in the divan and chairs, melting softly into browns that harmonised with the heavy beams of the ceiling. A few Navajo rugs covered the floor. Above the divan of many cushions was a bookshelf crowded with the new fiction of two continents. Several shelves, built like a bookcase, occupied a corner and were furnished more ponderously. In the middle of the room a large table was half covered with the best periodicals of the day, although there was room for a large lamp with a red shade and a vase filled with wild flowers. Down at the far end of the room, which was about thirty feet long, and opposite the kitchen, were the dining-table and a small sideboard. The main door opened upon a verandah, and one beside the fireplace into a narrow hall, giving privacy to the bedrooms. Ora had no atavistic yearnings for the life of the pioneer; she might feel as much at home in a bungalow as in a palace, but elementals, save when pictorially valuable, like overhead beams, were rigidly excluded. Her hands clasped behind her, she drifted up and down the long room, her mode of ambulation expressing the state of her mind. Quick and final as she could be in decision, if necessity spurred, the deeper sensuousness in her nature impelled her to drift whenever circumstances would permit. For two months she intended to drift--or gamble! She had not come out here further to alienate the affections of her friend’s husband, and those old tumultuous dreams were still crowded in some remote brain cell with seals on the door. She had even told herself in so many words that she had no desire for anything so terrific as their complete materialisation. She had plumbed the depth and intensity of life in her imagination. Let that suffice. And reality was not so much to be feared because of the wreck it might make of her life as because it was reasonably sure to leave a corpse in her memory, instead of that ever burning soul of past delights. But she had come out to her mine to enjoy the constant companionship of Gregory Compton before she left her country for ever and married a European. That much she owed to the extraordinary imaginative experience in which they had been one. If she could spend long hours with him, make him as eager for her companionship as she was for his, forget his mine now and then, feel that mysterious and satisfying bond of the spirit, she would ask no more, not even an admission of love when they parted.