"No, no, I am not." Sylvia tried to smile as she disengaged herself. "I am getting older. I am learning. If--if only I felt happy about Guy, I believe I should get on much better. But--but--" the tears rose to her eyes in spite of her--"he haunts me. I can't rest because of him. I dream about him. I feel torn in two. For Burke--has given him up. But I--I can't." "Of course you can't. You wouldn't." Matilda spoke with warmth. "Don't let Burke deprive you of your friends! Plenty of men imagine that when you have got a husband, you don't need anyone else. They little know." Sylvia's eyes went out across the _veldt_ to a faint, dim line of blue beyond, and dwelt upon it wistfully. "Don't you think it depends upon the husband?" she said. CHAPTER VIII OUT OF THE DEPTHS That night the thunder rolled among the _kopjes_, and Sylvia lay in her hut wide-awake and listening. The lightning glanced and quivered about the distant hills and threw a weird and fitful radiance about her bed, extinguishing the dim light thrown by her night-lamp. Bill Merston had brought her back a written message from her husband, and she lay with it gripped in her hand. For that message held a cry which had thrown her whole soul into tumult. "I want you," he had written in a hand that might have been Guy's. "I can't get on without you. I am coming to-morrow to fetch you back--if you will come." If she would come! In those last words she seemed to hear the appeal of a man's agony. What had he been through before he had brought himself to write those words? They hurt her unutterably, piercing her to the soul, when she remembered her own half-hearted offer to return. Yet she would have given all she had for a few days' respite. The hot fierce longing that beat in those few words frightened her by its intensity. It made her think of one of those overwhelming _veldt_ fires, consuming everything in its path, leaving behind it the blackness of desolation. Yes, he wanted her now because she had been denied to him. The flame of his desire had been fanned to a white heat. She seemed to feel it reaching out to her, scorching her, even as she lay. And she shrank with a desperate sense of impotence, feeling her fate to be sealed. For she knew that she must go to him. She must pass through the furnace anew. She must endure her fate. Afterwards--it might be--when it had burnt itself out, some spark of the Divine would be found kindled among the ashes to give her comfort.