But, if she considered which of the two had the more claim upon her allegiance, she found herself bewildered, divided. Felix had saved her life, but Denzil had preserved it. As she envisaged the situation, she felt that the die was cast. Her letter to Felix had bound her to Denzil. She wondered, over and over to herself, whether Felix had received that letter, and what he had felt upon reading it. Here, in her isolated loneliness, far from Aunt Bee, far from Denzil, she began to have an inkling as to what letters would mean to the exile, and to realize what Felix might have experienced, upon seeing her writing, snatching open the envelope, and reading the complete extinction of her own feeling for himself.... Was his present disappearance--could it be--the result of her cruelty? Had it made him reckless? Such thoughts poisoned the weary hours of the endless night. And through them all beat upon her brain the knowledge that Denzil was ill, so ill that he had wired for them to come to him. He would not have taken so extreme a course, had his sickness not been serious--had he not been in danger. What should she do, if after the bitter strain of her long journey, she found him dead when she arrived at Savlinsky? She pictured herself alone, in the mining village, with no woman near, with nobody but Vronsky, the Russian! Was it, after all, mad of her to undertake such a journey? She was thankful to rise from her sleepless couch, and shake off the wild dreams which visited her with every moment of unconsciousness. The varying country, the dim Ural Mountains, into the heart of which they ascended, the increasingly strange garb of the people, left hardly any impression upon her usually active mind. But during the day she rallied from her misgivings of the previous night, and girded at herself for a coward. There was nothing to take off her mind from its treadmill of apprehensions. The lady who was her fellow-traveler spoke English, but was very dull, and most likely herself thought the girl unresponsive. It had proved impossible to get English books for the journey, and she was without refuge from the harassing thoughts which yelped about her like snapping wolves. As the train bore her along the endless road, as day faded into night and morning dawned again along the illimitable plain, and sun shone and wind blew and clouds drifted, and meal-times came and passed like telegraph posts, the thought of her treachery--her double treachery--was ever in her mind, aching, desolating. Her fellow-traveler's encouraging assurance that they would be at Gretz in an hour or two was an untold relief. At Gretz she hoped for tidings of Denzil. She had telegraphed, before leaving St. Petersburg, that she was starting, and asked to have news wired to Gretz. Her telegram, in its brevity, said nothing of the fact that she was coming alone.