The eerie shadows of the desert drew back and hid themselves in the mountains.  The day began with splendid promise—­the day of the wolf-hunt, of which no word had been spoken to her by Peter.  She, too, was going hunting, but silently and unbidden she would steal through the forest and see this mysterious woman who played fast and loose with Peter, who loved her apparently all the better for the game she played.  What manner of woman could do these things?  What manner of woman could be indifferent to Peter?  Judith was consumingly curious to see.  And, apart from this naked and unashamed curiosity, there was the possibility that at sight of Miss Colebrooke there might come a relaxation of Peter’s tyrannous hold upon her thoughts, her life, her very heart’s blood.  Would her loyalty bear the test of seeing Peter made a fool of by a woman she could dismiss with a shrug—­a softly speaking shrew, perhaps, who played a waiting game with her finger on the pulse of Peter’s prospects?  For there was talk of a partnership with the Wetmores.  Or a fool, perhaps, for all her sonneting, for there are men who relish a weak headpiece as the chiefest ornament of women, especially when its indeterminate vagaries boast an escape-valve remotely connected with the fine arts.  Or a devil-woman, perhaps—­an upright wanton who could think no wrong from very poverty of temperament, yet kept him dangling.  The possibility of Kitty’s honesty, Judith in her jealousy would not admit.  Had she gone to the devil for him, stood and faced the drift of opinion for his sake, that Judith could have understood.  But what was the spinning of verses to a woman’s portion of loving and being loved?  Even Alida, through all her distracting anxieties, had in her heart the thrice-blessed leaven, reasoned the woman of the plains, who might, according to modern standards, be reckoned a trifle primitive in her psychological deductions.  And, withal, Judith was forced to admit that there was something simple and true about a man who would let a woman make a fool of him, whoever the woman was.

Perhaps with this hunting would end the long reign of Peter as a divinity.  Judith was tired, not in her vigorous young body, because that was strong and healthful as the hill wind, but tired in heart and mind and life.  Her destiny had not been beautiful or happy before he invaded it, but it had been calm, and now serenity seemed the worthiest gift of the gods.  It was not that she loved him less, but that she had so long reflected upon him that her imagination was numb; her thoughts, arid, unfruitful as the desert, turned from him to the problems that beset her, and from them back to him again, in dull, subconscious yearning.  She could no longer project an anguished consciousness to those scenes wherein he walked and talked with Kitty.  Her Indian fatalism had intervened.  “Life was life,” to be lived or left.  And yet she felt herself a poor creature, one who had lived long on illusion, who had bent her neck to the