They were returning by a somewhat different route, and were already about half-way to the camp. The sun was sinking, and the barren and rugged surface of rock and stunted vegetation was taking on a softer tinge as the westering glow toned down its asperities. But there was a feel in the air as of impending change, and the wind, which had died down altogether, now began to rise in fitful puffs, raising thin spiral columns like dust waterspouts, which whirled along at intervals on the plain around. "Is there going to be a storm?" said Hilda. "Yes. But not before we are in camp again." He subsided into silence. It was possible that the strange oppressiveness in the atmosphere affected him, to the exaggeration of that which was on his mind, to wit the very disagreeable burden of the news he had just received. Or it may have been that the certainty was brought home to him that a month ago it would not have affected him to any appreciable extent. The unpleasantness, the scandal, would have been just the same, but, somehow, it would have mattered little then. Now it did. But why? What was to be done? was his ever-present thought. It was simply abominable that he should be pursued in this way. Had the woman no sense of shame? Evidently not. He had heard of ships going down at sea with all on board; was he tempted to feel that this was clearly too good a piece of luck--seen from his point of view--to happen to the one which comprised among its passengers Cynthia Daintree? What was to be done? He looked at his companion. Should he frankly put the case to her? She was like no other woman he had ever known for clear insight into and ready grasp of the main facts or probabilities of any given question--at least, so he had found reason to decide during their somewhat short acquaintance--which, somehow or other, did not seem short. She could not be more than five or six and twenty at the outside, and yet the knowledge of human nature and capacity for the analysis of human motives she displayed was simply wonderful. He could put it to her as the case of a third party, or simply a case in the abstract, such as they had often debated and threshed out together, and then he laughed at himself in bitter contempt. Where were the qualities with which he had just been endowing her, that she could fail for one single instant to see through so miserable a device? He must put it to her frankly or not at all; and somehow Hilda Clive was the last person in the world to whom he desired to put it at all.