Deliberately, with a sort of fascination now, the girl watched its advance.  Her nerves were on edge this morning, and in its relentless stealth it began to assume an element of the uncanny.  Like a hostile alien thing, it seemed searching here and there in the tiny room for something definite, something it did not find.  Fatuous as it may seem, the impression grew upon her, augmented until in its own turn it became a dominant influence.  Her glance, heretofore absent, perfunctory, became intense.  The glare was well above the floor by this time and climbing higher and higher.  Answering the mythical challenge, of a sudden she sat up free in bed and, as though at a spoken injunction, looked about her fairly.

The place where she glanced, the point toward which the light was mounting, was beside her own bed and where, from rough-fashioned wooden pegs, hung the Indian’s pathetically scant wardrobe.  At first glance there seemed to the girl nothing unusual revealed thereon, nothing significant; and, restlessly observant, the inspection advanced.  Then, ere the mental picture could vanish, ere a new impression could take its place, in a flash of tardy recollection and of understanding came realisation complete, and her eyes returned.  For perhaps a minute thereafter she sat so, her great eyes unconsciously opening wider and wider, her brown skin shading paler second by second.  A minute so, a minute of nerve-tense inaction; then with a little gesture of weariness and of abandon absolute, she dropped back in her place, and covered her face from sight.

CHAPTER XVII

SACRIFICE

A week had gone by.  Each day of the seven the thoroughbred with the slender legs and the tiny sensitive ears had stood in the barren dooryard before Elizabeth Landor’s home.  Moreover, with each repetition the arrival had been earlier, the halt longer.  Though the weather was perfect, nevertheless the beast had grown impatient under the long waits, and telltale, a glaring black mound had come into being where he had pawed his displeasure.  At first Craig on departing had carefully concealed the testimony of his presence beneath a sprinkling of dooryard litter; but at last he had ceased to do so, and bit by bit the mound had grown.  Day had succeeded day, and no one had appeared to question the visitor’s right of coming or of going.  Even the wolf was no longer present to stare his disapproval.  Verily, unchallenged, the king had come into his own in this realm of one; and as a monarch absolute ever rules, Clayton Craig had reigned, was reigning now.

For he no longer halted perforce at the doorstep.  He had never been invited to enter, yet he had entered—­and the girl had spoken no word to prevent.  Not by request were his cap and riding stick hanging from a peg beside the few belongings of How Landor; yet, likewise unchallenged, they were there.  Not by the girl’s solicitation was he lounging intimately in the single rocker the room boasted; yet once again the bald fact remained that though it was not yet nine by the clock, he was present, his legs comfortably crossed, his eyes, beneath drooping lids, whimsically observing the girl as she went about the perfunctory labour of putting the place to rights.