For answer she leaned against him with a sigh of content. CHAPTER XXVII. "Elfin and human, airy and true; * * * * * * Your flowers and thorns you bring with you." --R.L.S. But the stumbling-block reasserted itself, and prevailed. The articles on Tibet were solid affairs, for a solid journal; twelve of them, to be paid for on acceptance; and since Lenox needed the money to clear off debts incurred when furnishing and pay for their trip to Kashmir, he decided to get them written as soon as might be, before the stealthy increase of heat made mental effort a burden. Thus, while the Battery absorbed his mornings, Tibet made unlawful inroads upon his afternoons and evenings; and the narrow margin of leisure thus left to him did not by any means satisfy Quita's healthy appetite for companionship. More than once she attempted remonstrance, pitched in the wrong key, only to be routed by the unanswerable argument that the work must be done, and that there was no other time in which to do it. Finally, in a mood between pride and resignation, she shrugged her shoulders and turned elsewhere for companionship; for interests to fill the long hours which Eldred's devotion to work left empty on her hands. And here, in a virtue pushed to the confines of vice, in the man's blind unintentional neglect of the woman for whom he would wring the last blood-drop out of his heart, you have the nucleus of more than half the pitiful domestic tragedies of India. It is the crucial moment, the genesis of a hundred unsuspected possibilities, this first divergence of the man and woman, along separate paths of interest. Love may be strong enough to stand the strain, but it will be love debarred from that intimate fusion of heart and brain which alone constitutes true marriage. The other kind is at best a permanent 'friendship recognised by the police':--a tacit confession of failure which this high-hearted, if contrarious couple were by no means minded to arrive at, now or ever. But there is no warning sign-post at the turn of the road; and already their feet were nearing it, without knowledge that its easy gradient slips into the Valley of Dry Bones.