Shefford pulled a blanket from his bed and covered his cold and trembling body.  He had sunk down off the log, was leaning back upon it.  The stars were pale, far off, and the valley seemed unreal.  He found himself listening—­listening with sick and terrible earnestness, trying to hear against the thrum and beat of his heart, straining to catch a sound in all that cold, star-blanched, silent valley.  But he could hear no sound.  It was as if death held the valley in its perfect silence.  How he hated that silence!  There ought to have been a million horrible, bellowing demons making the night hideous.  Did the stars serenely look down upon the lonely cabins of these exiles?  Was there no thunderbolt to drop down from that dark and looming mountain upon the silent cabin where tragedy had entered?  In all the world, under the sea, in the abysmal caves, in the vast spaces of the air, there was no such terrible silence as this.  A scream, a long cry, a moan—­these were natural to a woman, and why did not one of these sealed wives, why did not Fay Larkin, damn this everlasting acquiescent silence?  Perhaps she would fly out of her cabin, come running along the path.  Shefford peered into the bright patches of starlight and into the shadows of the cedars.  But he saw no moving form in the open, no dim white shape against the gloom.  And he heard no sound—­ not even a whisper of wind in the branches overhead.

Nas Ta Bega returned to the shade of the cedars and, lying down on his blankets, covered himself and went to sleep.  The fact seemed to bring bitter reality to Shefford.  Nothing was going to happen.  The valley was to be the same this night as any other night.  Shefford accepted the truth.  He experienced a kind of self-pity.  The night he had thought so much about, prepared for, and had forgotten had now arrived.  Then he threw another blanket round him, and, cold, dark, grim, he faced that lonely vigil, meaning to sit there, wide-eyed, to endure and to wait.

Jealousy and pain, following his frenzy, abided with him long hours, and when they passed he divined that selfishness passed with them.  What he suffered then was for Fay Larkin and for her sisters in misfortune.  He grew big enough to pity these fanatics.  The fiery, racing tide of blood that had made of him only an animal had cooled with thought of others.  Still he feared that stultifying thing which must have been hate.  What a tempest had raged within him!  This blood of his, that had received a stronger strain from his desert life, might in a single moment flood out reason and intellect and make him a vengeful man.  So in those starlit hours that dragged interminably he looked deep into his heart and tried to fortify himself against a dark and evil moment to come.