the whole man.  He was badly put together, loose-jointed, ungainly.  The fact that he was tall profited him nothing, for it merely emphasised the extreme ungracefulness of his figure.  His long pale face was made paler by the shock of coarse, tow-coloured hair; his eyes, even, looked colourless, though they were certainly the least uninteresting feature of his face, for they were not devoid of expression.  He had a way of slouching when he moved that singularly intensified the general uncouthness of his appearance.  “Are you very tired?” asked his wife, gently, when he had dismounted close to the tent.  The question would have been an unnecessary one had it been put to her instead of to her husband, for her voice had that peculiar flat toneless sound for which extreme weariness is answerable.

“Well, no, my dear, not very,” he replied, drawling out the words with an exasperating air of delivering a final verdict, after deep reflection on the subject.

The girl glanced once more at the fading colours on the hills.  “Come in and rest,” she said, moving aside a little to let him pass.

She stood lingering a moment after he had entered the tent, as though unwilling to leave the outer air; and before she turned to follow him she drew a deep breath, and her hand went for one swift second to her throat as though she felt stifled.

Later on that evening she sat in her tent, sewing by the light of the lamp that stood on her little table.

Opposite to her, her husband stretched his ungainly length in a deck-chair, and turned over a pile of official notes.  Every now and then her eyes wandered from the gay silks of the table-cover she was embroidering to the canvas walls which bounded the narrow space into which their few household goods were crowded.  Outside there was a deep hush.  The silence of the vast empty plain seemed to work its way slowly, steadily in toward the little patch of light set in its midst.  The girl felt it in every nerve; it was as though some soft-footed, noiseless, shapeless creature, whose presence she only dimly divined, was approaching nearer—­nearer.  The heavy outer stillness was in some way made more terrifying by the rustle of the papers her husband was reading, by the creaking of his chair as he moved, and by the little fidgeting grunts and half-exclamations which from time to time broke from him.  His wife’s hand shook at every unintelligible mutter from him, and the slight habitual contraction between her eyes deepened.

All at once she threw her work down on to the table.  “For heaven’s sake—­please, John, talk!” she cried.  Her eyes, for the moment’s space in which they met the startled ones of her husband, had a wild, hunted look, but it was gone almost before his slow brain had time to note that it had been there—­and was vaguely disturbing.  She laughed a little unsteadily.

“Did I startle you?  I’m sorry.  I”—­she laughed again—­“I believe I’m a little nervous.  When one is all day alone—­” She paused without finishing the sentence.  The man’s face changed suddenly.  A wave of tenderness swept over it, and at the same time an expression of half-incredulous delight shone in his pale eyes.