She smiled a little.

“You must learn to possess your soul in patience,” she said, and glanced inconsequently from Broomhurst to her husband, and then dropped her eyes and was silent a moment.

John was obviously, and a little audibly, enjoying his dinner.  He sat with his chair pushed close to the table, and his elbows awkwardly raised, swallowing his soup in gulps.  He grasped his spoon tightly in his bony hand, so that its swollen joints stood out larger and uglier than ever, his wife thought.

Her eyes wandered to Broomhurst’s hands.  They were well shaped, and, though not small, there was a look of refinement about them; he had a way of touching things delicately, a little lingeringly, she noticed.  There was an air of distinction about his clear-cut, clean-shaven face, possibly intensified by contrast with Drayton’s blurred features; and it was, perhaps, also by contrast with the gray cuffs that showed beneath John’s ill-cut drab suit that the linen Broomhurst wore seemed to her particularly spotless.

Broomhurst’s thoughts, for his part, were a good deal occupied with his hostess.

She was pretty, he thought, or perhaps it was that, with the wide, dry lonely plain as a setting, her fragile delicacy of appearance was invested with a certain flower-like charm.

“The silence here seems rather strange, rather appalling at first, when one is fresh from a town,” he pursued, after a moment’s pause; “but I suppose you’re used to it, eh, Drayton?  How do you find life here, Mrs. Drayton?” he asked, a little curiously, turning to her as he spoke.

She hesitated a second.  “Oh, much the same as I should find it anywhere else, I expect,” she replied; “after all, one carries the possibilities of a happy life about with one; don’t you think so?  The Garden of Eden wouldn’t necessarily make my life any happier, or less happy, than a howling wilderness like this.  It depends on one’s self entirely.”

“Given the right Adam and Eve, the desert blossoms like the rose, in fact,” Broomhurst answered, lightly, with a smiling glance inclusive of husband and wife; “you two don’t feel as though you’d been driven out of Paradise, evidently.”

Drayton raised his eyes from his plate with a smile of total incomprehension.

“Great heavens! what an Adam to select!” thought Broomhurst, involuntarily, as Mrs. Drayton rose rather suddenly from the table.

“I’ll come and help with that packing-case,” John said, rising, in his turn, lumberingly from his place; “then we can have a smoke—­eh!  Kathie don’t mind, if we sit near the entrance.”

The two men went out together, Broomhurst holding the lantern, for the moon had not yet risen.  Mrs. Drayton followed them to the doorway, and, pushing the looped-up hanging farther aside, stepped out into the cool darkness.

Her heart was beating quickly, and there was a great lump in her throat that frightened her as though she were choking.