had been unrolled before her eyes.  Sensations, thoughts, impulses of which she had never previously dreamed had been hers.  Passions unconceived had stalked before her gaze.  More a nightmare on the whole than an awakening it had all been; yet nevertheless the experience had been hers.  Much of its meaning had passed her by.  Events had crowded too thickly for her to grasp the whole; but en masse the effect had been definite—­startlingly definite.  Unbelievable as it may seem, for the first time in her existence she had aroused to the consciousness of being an individual entity.  The inevitable metamorphosis of age, the thing which differentiates a child from an adult, belated long in her passive life, had at last taken place.  Bewilderingly sudden, so sudden that as yet she had not adjusted herself to the change, had barely become conscious thereof, yet certain as existence itself, the transformation had come to pass.  Looking back there that afternoon, looking where the town had been and now was not, mingling with the impressions of a day full to overflowing, there came to the girl for the first time a definite appreciation of this thing that she had done.  And that moment from the scene, never to appear again, passed Bess Landor the child; and invisibly into her place, taking up the play where the other had left, came Elizabeth Landor the woman.

Very, very long the girl sat there so; unconsciously long.  With the swift reaction of youth, the scene of the excitement vanished, the personal menace gone, the impression it had made passed promptly into abeyance.  As when she and the man had sat alone in the tiny room of the hotel, another consideration was too insistent, too vital, to prevent dominating the moment.  Any other diversion, save absolute physical pain itself, would have been inadequate, was inadequate.  Gradually, minute by minute, as the outline of the town itself had vanished, the depressing impression of that jeering frontier mob faded; and in its stead, looming bigger and bigger, advancing, enfolding like a storm cloud until it blotted out every other thought, came realisation of the thing she had done:  came appreciation of its finality, its immensity.  Then it was that the infinite bigness of this uninhabited wild, the sense of its infinite loneliness, pressed her close.  Despite herself, against all reason, as a child is afraid of the dark there grew upon her a terror of this intangible thing called solitude that stretched out into the future endlessly.  Smiling as it was this day, unchangeably smiling, she fancied a time when it would not smile, when its passive eventless monotony would be maddening.  Swiftly, cumulatively as with every intense nature impressions reproduce, this one augmented.  Again into the consideration intruded the absolute finality, the irrevocability of her choice.  More distinctly than when she had listened to the original, memory recalled the vow of the marriage ceremony she had taken:  “For