Her face and throat looked ghastly white for a moment in the sheltered candles.  “Isn’t it silly of me—­isn’t it—­isn’t it?” she kept repeating, picking at his fingers, and touching his cheeks in frightened fashion....  She was reaching amazing deeps of him.  The best of her was his, for she could give greatly.  It was wonderful, if momentary.  He felt the terrific strength of his hands, as if his fingers must strike sparks when he touched her flesh.  The need of her flamed high within him.  She was delight in every movement and expression; and so slender and fervent and sweet-voiced....  She had banished the one encroachment of sordidness.  The high passion of this moment was builded upon basic attractions, as with children.  Some strong intuition had prevailed upon her so to build.  They had come to an end of words....

A knock at the door broke the notturno appassionato.  She had left word not to be called for any reason.  Furiously now she rushed across the room....  Bedient did not see the female servant at the door, but heard the frightened voice uttering the word, “Brigadier——.”  The answer from the woman who had left his arms was mercifully vague, but the voice at the door whimpered, “Only it was the General——!"...

It was all hideously clear.  Bedient was left sterile, polar.  The door slammed shut; the woman faced him—­and understood.  There was no restoring this ruin....  She now damned military rank and her establishment in a slow, dreadful voice.  Her knuckles seemed driven into her temples.  She wanted to weep, to be soothed and petted—­to have her Hour brought back, but she saw that her beauty was gone from him—­and all the mystery which had been in their relation a minute before....  Her rebellion, so far hard-held, now became fiendish.  It was not against him, but herself.  So vivid and terrible was her concentration of hatred upon the cause, that Bedient caught the picture of the Brigadier in her mind.  He saw the man afterward—­a fat and famous soldier....  She spat upon the floor.  Her lower lip was drawn in and the small white teeth snapped upon it.

There was nothing in the Block-House ever to bring him back.  Her last vestige of attraction for him had disintegrated.  Bedient had nothing to say; he caught up her clenched hand and kissed it....  And in the street he heard feminine voices rising to the pitch of hysteria.  A servant rushed forth for a surgeon.  The woman had fallen into “one of her seizures."...

Pack-train Thirteen took the field a day or two afterward.  Bedient was not at all himself....  In all the months that followed meeting David Cairns in Alphonso, the Block-House incident was too close and horrible for words—­though Bedient spoke of Adelaide and the great wind and a hundred other matters.