Maurice frowned, and sighed. In all his knowledge of her, Quita had never so completely lost her self-control. It was quite upsetting: and he disliked being upset the first thing in the morning. It put him out of tune for the rest of the day. But after all . . one must eat. And he retraced his steps to the dining-room. "I wish to heaven she had never discovered this uncomfortable husband of hers!" he reflected as he went "Since he will neither marry her, nor leave her alone; and it is we who have to suffer for his heroics!" For all that, he found speedy consolation in the thought that at ten o'clock a new 'subject' was coming to sit to him:--a wrinkled hag, whom he had met on his way back from Jundraghat, bent half double under a towering load of grass, her neutral-tinted tunic and draped trousers relieved by the scarlet of betel-nut on her lips and gums, and by a goat's-hair necklet strung with raw lumps of amber and turquoise, interset with three plaques of beaten silver;--the only form of savings bank known to these simple children of the hills. While hastily demolishing his breakfast, Maurice visualised his picture in every detail: and with the arrival of his model all thought of Quita and her woes was crowded out of his mind. Yet the man was not heartless, by any means. He was simply an artist of the extreme type, endowed by temperament with the capacity for subordinating all things,--his own griefs no less than the griefs of others,--to one dominant, insatiable purpose. And according to his lights he must be judged. Quita remained invisible till lunch-time, lying inert, where she had flung herself, upon her unmade bed. The first tempest of misery, and rebellion, and self-castigation had given place to sheer exhaustion. For even suffering has its limitations; which is perhaps the reason why grief rarely kills. All the springs of life seemed suddenly to have run down. Her spirit felt crushed and broken by the obstructiveness of all about her. The strain of the past three weeks, following upon a severe shock, had told upon her more than she knew; and this morning's sharp revulsion of feeling brought her near to purely physical collapse. And while she lay alone through two endless hours, tracing designs from the cracks in the whitewashed wall, one conviction haunted her with morbid persistence. Because she had not valued him in the beginning, because she had repudiated him in a moment of wounded pride, he would be taken from her, now that heart and soul were set upon him, and she would never see him again. It was useless to argue that the idea was childish; a mere nightmare of overwrought nerves. It persisted and prevailed, till she felt herself crushed in the grip of a relentless, impersonal Force, against which neither penitence nor tears would avail. Finally, worn out with pain and rebellion, she fell asleep. BOOK III.-THE TENTS OF ISHMAEL. CHAPTER XVIII.