“You are Miss Rodney, I believe?”

Kitty was conscious of something strange in her voice as she looked into the dark eyes, wide with questioning fear.  Ah, but she had amazing beauty, and a something that seemed of the very essence of deep-souled womanliness!  The two women presented a fine bit of antithesis, Kitty, flower-like, small, delicately wrought, the finished product of the town, exotic as some rare transplanted orchid growth.  And in Judith there was a gemlike quality:  it was in the bloom of her skin, the iridescent radiance of her hair, that was bluish, like a plum in sunlight; it was in the warm, red life in her lips, in the pulsing vitality of the slim, brown throat; in every line was sensuous force restrained by spiritual passion.

Kitty told of the accident in which her horse had thrown her and disappeared in the pine fringes, leaving her stunned for a moment or two; and how she had finally pulled herself together and followed what appeared to be a trail, in the hope of finding some one.  She dwelt long on the details of the accident.

“Yes, but Peter, what has happened him?” Judith chose her words impatiently.  She was racked with anxiety at his long delay, and now she hung over Kitty, waiting for her answer, without the semblance of a cloak for her alarm.

There was reproof in Kitty’s amendment.  “I don’t know which way Mr. Hamilton’s horse went.  It started back over the trail, I think.”

Judith clasped her hands.  “Let us go and look for him.  Why do we waste time?” But Kitty hung back.  She was shaken from her fall, and upset by the events of the morning.  Besides, her faith in Peter’s ability to cope with all the exigencies of this country was supreme.  And chiefest reason of all for her not going was a something within her that winced at the thought of this fellowship that had for its object the quest of Peter.

“Oh, don’t you see,” pleaded Judith, “that if something had not happened to him he would have been here long ago?”

Judith’s anxiety awoke in Kitty a new consciousness.  What was she to him, that at the possibility of harm, a fear not shared by Kitty, she should throw off a reserve that every line of her face pronounced habitual?  In her very energy of attitude, an energy that all unconsciously communicated itself to Kitty, there was the power that belongs to all elemental human emotion—­the power that compels.  Kitty rose to follow Judith, then hesitated.

“I’m sure nothing has happened him.  No, I’m really too unstrung by my fall to walk.”  She sank again to the bowlder on which she had been sitting.