More ironically than before laughed fate; and again with the voice of Elizabeth Landor. "You're humorous, How, deliciously humorous; and still you haven't the vestige of a sense of humour." She laughed again involuntarily. "I hadn't myself a few weeks ago. I think I was even more deficient than you; but now--now--" Once again the tense-strung laugh, while in her lap the crossed hands locked and grew white from mutual pressure. "Now of a sudden I seem to see humour in everything!" More than perplexed, concerned, distressed from his very inability to fathom the new mood, the man again brought the team to a walk, fumbled with the reins impotently. "Something's wrong, Bess," he hesitated. "Something's worrying you. Tell me what it is, won't you?" "Wrong?" The girl returned the look fair, almost defiantly. "Wrong?" Still again the laugh; unmusical, hysterical. "Certainly nothing is wrong. What could be wrong when two people who have so much in common as you and I, who touch at so many places, are just married and alone? Wrong: the preposterous idea!" She was silent, and of a sudden the all-surrounding stillness seemed to be intensified. For at last, at last the man understood and was looking at her; looking at her wordlessly, with an expression that was terrible in its haunting suggestion of unutterable sadness, of infinite pain. He did not say a word; he merely looked at her; but shade by shade as the seconds passed there vanished from his face to the last bit every trace of the glory that had been its predecessor. Not until it was gone did the girl realise to the full what she had done, realise the mortal stab she had inflicted; then of a sudden came realisation in a gust and contrition unspeakable. Swiftly as rain follows a thunderclap her mood changed, her own face, hysterically tense, relaxed in a flood of tears. In an abandon of remorse her arms were about him, her face was pressed close to his face. "Forgive me, How," she pleaded. "I didn't mean to hurt you. I'm nervous and irresponsible, that's all. Please forgive me; please!" * * * * * At a dawdling little prairie stream, superciliously ignored by the map-maker, yet then and now travelling its aimless journey from nowhere to nowhere under the name of Mink Creek, they halted for the night. Though they had been driving steadily all the afternoon, save once when, far to the south, they had detected the blot of a grazing herd, they had seen no sign of human presence. They saw no indication now. The short fall day was drawing to a close. The sun, red as maple leaf in autumn, was level with the earth when How Landor pulled up beside the low sloping bank, and, the girl watching from her observation seat in the old surrey, unharnessed and watered the team and hobbled them amid the tall frost-cured grass to feed. "Now for the tent," he said on returning. "Will your highness have it face north, south, east, or west?"