It remains to add that Eldred's avowal had not shocked or repelled her as much as he had feared. For, among Michael's promiscuous intimates in Paris, Vienna, Rome, she had seen and heard more than Lenox was likely to guess of that enslavement to drugs and absinthe to which the artist's temperament seems peculiarly prone; though she was far from realising in detail the full horror and degradation involved. She merely felt certain that--heredity or no--Eldred was, by the nature of him, incapable of travelling far down that awful road; that with her at his side to hearten and help him, he could not fail to free himself from "the accursed chain." But they must fight the battle together. That was the Alpha and Omega of her thoughts. He had not yet measured the height and depth of her love. Let her only make this clear to him, and he must give in; if not to-night, at least before his leave was up. Years of living with Michael had accustomed her to getting her own way in all essentials. But she had yet to try her strength against the bed-rock of Scottish granite underlying her husband's surface quietness; against the terrible singleness of mind that cannot--even for Love's dear sake--view harsh facts through a medium of rosy mist. While she stood thus, trying to see into the darkness that shrouds the coming day, even the coming hour, from inquisitive eyes, the drifting vapour all about her paled from grey to white, from white to a gossamer film; and finally uprose from the valley, like a spotless scroll rolled backward by an unseen Hand, giving gradually to view a multitude of mountains, newly washed; mountains that glowed with richest tints of purple and amethyst and rose, in the level light of afternoon. And Quita, being in a fanciful mood, saw in this "good gigantic smile" of the rain-soaked earth a happy omen; an assurance that so would the mists rise from her own life, and the sunlight prevail. A sudden recollection of the buffalo "_Mela_" set her smiling. "How idiotic I am!" she reproved herself gently;--we are apt to be gentle with our own foolishness; it never seems quite so egregious as other people's--"I might be a girl of twenty, after my first proposal, instead of nearly thirty, and a nominal wife of five years' standing."