He wondered what she was thinking of as she sat her horse, gazing out over the wide spaces, so wearily and yet so intently.  She did not seem to have heard his last remarks, or was that merely the impression she desired to convey?  A vague uneasiness took possession of him.  He did not like her to look like that.

“Shall we move on?” he said gently.

She pointed suddenly across the veldt.  “I want to ride as far as that skeleton tree,” she said.  “Don’t come with me!  I shall catch you up if you ride slowly.”

“Right!” said Kelly, and watched her lift her bridle and ride away.

He would have done anything to oblige her just then; but his curiosity was whetted to a keen edge.  For she rode swiftly, as one who had a definite aim in view.  Straight as an arrow across the veldt she went to the skeleton tree with its stripped trunk and stark, outflung arms that seemed the very incarnation of the barrenness around.

Here she checked her animal, and sat for a moment with closed eyes, the evening sunlight pouring over her.  Very strangely she was trembling from head to foot, as if in the presence of a vision upon which she dared not look.  She had returned as she had always meant to return—­but ah, the dreary desert spaces and the cruel roughness of the road!  Her husband’s words uttered only a few hours before came back upon her as she stood there.  “We may never reach the top of the world now,” No, they would never reach it.  Had anyone ever done so, she wondered drearily?  But yet they had been near it once—­nearer than many.  Did that count for nothing?

It seemed to her that aeons had passed over her since last she had stood beneath that tree.  She had been a girl then, ardent and full of courage.  Now she was a woman, old and very tired, and there was nothing left in life.  It was almost as if she had ceased to live.

But yet she had come back to the starting-point, and here, as if standing beside a grave and reading the inscription to one long dead, she opened her eyes in the last glow of the sunshine to read the words which Burke had cut into the bare wood on the evening of his wedding-day.  She remembered how she had waited for him, the tumult of doubt, of misgiving, in her soul, how she had wished he would not linger in that desolate place.  Now, out of the midst of a desolation to which this sandy waste was as nothing, she searched with almost a feeling of awe as one about to read a message from the dead.

The bare, bleached trunk of the tree shone strangely in the sinking sun, faintly tinted with rose.  The world all around her was changing; slowly, imperceptibly, changing.  A tender lilac glow was creeping over the veldt.  A curious sensation came upon Sylvia, as if she were moving in a dream, as if she were stepping into a new world and the old had fallen from her.  The bitterness had lifted from her spirit.  Her heart beat faster.  She was a treasure-seeker on the verge of a great discovery.  Trembling, she lifted her eyes. . . .