While the holiday folk trooped into the long mess-tent, laughing or lamenting over the afternoon's vicissitudes, Lenox sat at his table in shirt and trousers, his pen devouring the loose sheets before him. He bade Zyarulla bring him meat, bread, and a cup of coffee, and deny admittance even to 'Desmond Sahib' himself. And throughout the night he worked, and smoked, and finally slept as he had not slept since the Bachelors' Ball. Before dawn he was up, and out: a gun on his shoulder, field-glasses slung across his back. He had given orders for a party of beaters to be requisitioned, in his name, from the Rajah's camp; and Zyarulla could be trusted to see to it that he should not starve. All day he tramped and climbed, shot and sketched, to his huge satisfaction; and returning at dusk, repeated his programme of the night before. His departure without a word of explanation had roused Desmond's anxiety. He suspected a fresh supply of tobacco; and this sudden invisibility confirmed his worst fears. He spoke of them to his wife after breakfast: and for all her radiant hopefulness of heart, she had small consolation to offer him. The 'week's' events had disappointed her grievously; for the deadlock between man and wife seemed complete. "Truly, Theo, I don't know what to make of them both," she concluded desperately. "They are the most perverse couple that were ever invented. Benedick and Beatrice were turtle-doves by comparison! After this week I shall give them up in despair." "Poor darling! They ought to mend their ways, if only out of consideration for you! Come on now and comfort your soul with tilting. I want you to carry all before you in the tournament." "Do you indeed!" she answered, laughing. "But I shan't hit a single ring to-day. This distracting muddle is getting on my nerves!" And if Honor Desmond found the strain of sympathetic anxiety ill to endure, what of Quita, whose life's happiness hung upon the issue? For her the Kajiar Camp, despite its light-comedy atmosphere, had proved a nightmare of surface hilarity, broken rest, and growing distaste for the man whose name she had permitted to be coupled with her own:--all to no purpose, it seemed, save to inflate his self-satisfaction, and fortify his intention, now too clearly manifest, of hindering to the utmost her reunion with her husband. Moreover, her self-imposed attitude became increasingly hard to maintain. A flash of defiance is one thing; but sustained defiance, when the heart has unblushingly gone over to the enemy, puts a severe strain upon the nerves. And what was to be the outcome?