He lay wearily on his arms, trying to understand. How had it all happened so fast? The colony had absorbed her like water into sand, leaving nothing for him. Even the cub had gone in to sleep beside her. To sleep beside her! How acutely he would feel the absence of her body tonight. He felt himself out of place: in the wrong tale, immersed in chapters and characters that all around him understood, but which were to him as incomprehensible as the Valley had been to Sylviana. But this new life would not have seemed so bleak, perhaps even pleasant, if while it slowly took possession of him, he was not losing the one thing in all the world that truly mattered: the love of the woman he had once called his. HIS..... He felt soft fingers touch the back of his head, then slide downward and begin to massage his neck and aching shoulders. He did not move, knowing by touch alone that it was not his mate. He knew it was Kataya, but was too exhausted, both physically and emotionally, to react one way or the other. But to the watching figure in the doorway, there was no such ambivalence. Sylviana was furious. How different when the shoe is on the other foot, was a thought she strangled as soon as it began to form inside her. She had gone to the spacious bed, surrounded by things she thought missing from her life, only to experience the same emptiness and sense of loss at not feeling the familiar body beside her, and having no one to tell of her contentment. She tried to shrug it off and just sleep. But she had slept off and on all day, and felt her weariness replaced by a kind of yearning restlessness. PROBABLY JUST MY CONSCIENCE, she had told herself. And with this the gentler part of her nature had begun to rebel, saying that Kalus was a kind and decent man, who deserved better than to be spoken to and treated as if he were some kind of savage. But these gentle, Christian sentiments were too easily dismissed. He had acted abominably, her harder self retorted, and fully deserved the scorn that she had shown him. And perhaps this was the problem---trying to make herself think more fondly of him through the mind. Because gratitude and compassion are not lasting in love, while instinct and self-fulfillment never fade. If she could simply have admitted to herself that she missed the security and intimacy of lying in his arms, and that the crowning pleasure of her new-found happiness would have been to open herself to him, both body and spirit, she could have put aside the hopeless tangle of her emotions and simply gone to him, and taken him to her, and renewed again the bond of true lovers. As it was she could only toss restlessly, then get up and pace in frustration.