“I feel,” she told him drearily, “as if I want to get away from everything and everybody.”

“Oh no, you don’t!” he said.  “All you want is to get away from Burke.  That’s your trouble—­and always will be under present conditions.  Do you think I haven’t looked on long enough?  Why don’t you go away?”

“Go away!” She looked up at him again, startled.

Guy’s sunken eyes were shining with a fierce intensity.  They urged her more poignantly than words.  “Don’t you see what’s going to happen—­if you don’t?” he said.

That moved her.  She sprang up with a sound that was almost a cry, and stood facing him, her hand hard pressed against her heart.

“Of course I know he’s a wonderful chap and all that,” Guy went on.  “But you haven’t cheated yourself yet into believing that you care for him, have you?  He isn’t the sort to attract any woman at first sight, and I’ll wager he has never made love to you.  He’s far too busy with his cattle and his crops.  What on earth did you marry him for?  Can’t you see that he makes a slave of everyone who comes near him?”

But she lifted her head proudly at that.  “He has never made a slave of me,” she said.

“He will,” Guy rejoined relentlessly.  “He’ll have you under his heel before many weeks.  You know it in your heart.  Why did you marry him, Sylvia?  Tell me why you married him!”

The insistence of the question compelled an answer.  Yet she paused, for it was a question she had never asked herself.  Why had she married Burke indeed?  Had it been out of sheer expediency?  Or had there been some deeper and more subtle reason?  She knew full well that there was probably not another man in Africa to whom she would have thus entrusted herself, however urgent the circumstances.  How was it then that she had accepted Burke?

And then, looking into Guy’s tense face, the answer came to her, and she had uttered it almost before she knew.  “I married him because he was so like you.”

The moment she had uttered the words she would have recalled them, for Guy made an abrupt movement and turned so white that she thought he would faint.  His eyes went beyond her with a strained, glassy look, and for seconds he stood so, as one gone suddenly blind.

Then with a jerk he pulled himself together, and gave her an odd smile that somehow cut her to the heart.

“That was a straight hit anyway,” he said.  “And are you going to stick to him for the same reason?”

She turned her face away with the feeling of one who dreads to look upon some grievous hurt.  “No,” she said, in a low voice.  “Only because—­I am his wife.”

Guy made a short, contemptuous sound.  “And for that you’re going to let him ride rough-shod over you—­give him the right to control your every movement?  Oh, forgive me, but you good people hold such ghastly ideas of right and wrong.  And what on earth do you gain by it all?  You sacrifice everything to the future, and the future is all mirage—­all mirage.  You’ll never get there, never as long as you live.”