She had no idea what she was going to say. She thought only that she would go into his tent, where she would probably find him writing at his table; and she would put her arms about him, and tell him that she could not live under his displeasure.
At last she reached the rocks; and, as she rode round them, she drew up her reins and prepared to dismount. Then, with horrible suddenness, the truth was, as it were flung at her. Where she had thought to see the tents, there was only a patch of broken-up sand, a few bits of paper and straw, and innumerable footprints.
She uttered a little cry of dismay, and, with wide, frightened eyes, gazed about her. The footprints of the camels passed in a thin line out to the west, and she could see them winding away into the silent desert.
CHAPTER XXIII – THE NATURE OF WOMEN
Kate Bindane had just gone up to her room and was standing there alone, examining herself disapprovingly in the long mirror, when Muriel staggered in, her face white, her knees giving way.
“Kate!” she cried. “He’s gone!”
She threw herself down on the floor in front of a low arm-chair, and spreading her arms across its seat, buried her face in them.
Her friend stood perfectly still for a few moments, staring down at her in amazement. She had never before seen Muriel give way to uncontrolled grief in this manner; and she was frightened by the terrible rasping of her muffled sobs, and by the convulsive heaving of her shoulders. She did not know what to do, and her hands hesitated uncertainly between the whiskey-bottle standing on a shelf and the smelling-salts upon the dressing-table near to it.
At last, discarding the stimulants, she knelt down by her friend’s side, and put her strong arm around her. The tears had come into her own eyes, and as she patted Muriel’s shoulder, she fumbled for her handkerchief with her disengaged hand.
“Hush, hush, my darling!” she whispered. “Tell me what has happened.”
“He’s gone,” Muriel sobbed. “The camp’s gone. I saw the track of his camels leading away into the desert.”
She could say no more, and for a considerable time continued her passionate weeping.
At length she raised her head. “There are only some bits of paper and things left,” she moaned; and therewith she returned to her bitter tears.
Kate rose to her feet. “I am going to ’phone your father,” she said, “and ask him what has happened.”
She gave Muriel an encouraging pat, and hastened into the adjoining sitting-room, where a telephone was affixed to the wall. A few minutes later she was speaking to Lord Blair, asking him the reason of Daniel’s departure.
“We’ve just seen the deserted site of his camp,” she said, “and poor Muriel is in floods of tears.”
“Dear, dear!” came the reply. “Poor girl! Tell her Daniel has only gone away for a short time. I have had to send him to the Oases on business, that’s all.”
“Rather sudden, wasn’t it?” queried Kate.
Lord Blair coughed. “Daniel is always very prompt to act, when action has to be taken,” he said.
“Didn’t he leave any note or message for Muriel?”
“No, none,” was the reply. “He went away in a great hurry. Am I to expect Muriel back to dinner?”
“With her eyes bunged up?” exclaimed Kate, impatiently. “Of course not. I’ll send her back to you in the morning. Hav’n’t you anything to say to comfort her?”
There was a pause. “Yes,” he replied at length, “tell her I’ve just seen Ada going upstairs with two bandboxes. She says they are new night-dresses from Maison Duprez.”
Kate uttered a contemptuous grunt. “That’s the last thing to tell her!” she exclaimed. “Good-night.”
She slammed down the receiver, and, going back to her bedroom, repeated to Muriel her father’s explanation of Daniel’s departure. This brought some comfort into the girl’s forlorn heart; and a second outburst of tears, which occurred an hour or so later, was due more to a kind of self-pity, perhaps, than to despair.
“It’s so unkind of him,” she cried, “to go off without even saying good-bye, or leaving a note.”
“But from what I gather,” Kate replied, “he doesn’t think you really care much about him.”
“Ah, I do, I do,” Muriel wailed, wringing her hands.
“Well, you know,” Kate commented, somewhat brutally, “seeing how you’ve been carrying on this last month, I shouldn’t have said myself that you were really stuck on him.”
“You don’t understand,” Muriel moaned. “I wanted to be properly engaged to him, but he wouldn’t hear of it – I told you at the time. I don’t believe he ever wanted to marry me at all,” she exclaimed, passionately. “I believe he only wanted me to run away with him.”
Suddenly she looked up, with a curious light in her face. “I wonder…” She paused. She recalled the words he had said when he first knew her: “Why don’t you break loose?” And then last night he had said: “I shall never get to the real you until you cut loose from all this.” Could it be that the manner of his going away was meant to be a sort of silent gesture, a beckoning to her to follow?
She was so absorbed in her thoughts that her tears dried upon her face; and presently Kate was able to induce her to make somewhat more than a pretence of tasting the little dinner which had been sent up to them.
Later in the evening, when Benifett Bindane had come upstairs, and when Muriel had gone to her own room, Kate told her husband that she would sleep that night with her friend.
“As you wish, my dear,” he answered pleasantly. “You must help her to get over this business. She’ll soon live it down, I expect.”
Kate looked annoyed. “You needn’t be so damned cheerful about it,” she said. “I sometimes think you haven’t got a heart at all.”
He sat down loosely, and stared at her for some moments, as though about to make a profound remark.
“Spit it out,” said Kate encouragingly.
“I was just thinking,” he droned, “that I shall probably get Lane as our General Manager after all.”
She turned upon him. “Oh, you cold-blooded brute! It’s always business first with you. I suppose you’re hoping he’ll never want to come back to Cairo.”
“Well,” he mused, “he evidently feels that life in the Oases suits him better.”
“Ugh!” his wife ejaculated. “I suppose you think he’ll be content to be a sort of pasha out there, with his harîm of Bedouin women; raking in a fat salary from your precious Company, and fleecing the natives to fill your pockets. It’s a pretty picture!”
“Well, it isn’t a prettier picture,” he answered, “to think of a fine man like that messing about Cairo, wasting his time at dinner parties and dances on a wretched Foreign Office pittance.”
Kate did not continue the discussion, and it was not long before she went to her friend’s room, where, entering quietly, she found Muriel standing in her nightdress at the western window, her bare arms resting on the high sill, and her gaze fixed upon the obscurity of the desert which lay black and desolate under the stars. The window was open, and the drifting night-wind stirred the mass of her dark hair which fell about her shoulders.
She turned quickly as she heard the footstep, and Kate was dismayed at the pallor of her face.
“I can’t make him out,” Muriel said. “I can’t make him out. Right out there somewhere, in that blackness, he is smoking his pipe and stroking his dogs and yawning himself to sleep. And yet he must know that I’m here, calling to him and crying to him.”
She stretched out her arms, her fists clenched. “O God!” she muttered, “Let me understand him, let me see what’s in his mind.”
Kate drew the curtain across the window, as though she would shut out the dark menace of the desert, and drew her friend towards the bed.
“It’ll all come out in the wash, old girl,” she choked. “You’re not the only woman who finds her man incomprehensible sometimes.”
She looked at Muriel and Muriel at her; and suddenly, like two children, they put their heads each upon the other’s shoulder, and sobbed as though their hearts would break.
When Muriel returned next morning to the Residency, she went up to her own sitting-room at once; and presently she sent a message down to her father, who was at work in his study, asking him to come to her as soon as he had a few minutes to spare: nor was it long before he came tripping into the room.
It was evident that he felt the situation to be somewhat awkward; for his remarks began on a piping note of jocularity, and so rapidly descended the scale to one of profound melancholy that Muriel was reminded of a gramophone running down.
“Father,” she said presently, “I want you to tell me exactly what Daniel said about me before he left. I suppose he told you that we had had a quarrel.”
Lord Blair seemed puzzled, and he raised his hands in a gesture indicating his lack of grasp of the essential points in Daniel’s recent tirade.
“Yes, he told me about the little tiff; but I really don’t know whether I apprehend his meaning exactly. He was very much upset, very overwrought. It seems, if I have understood him aright, that he finds fault with you because you are rather – what shall I say? – rather given to the superficialities of our civilization. He would prefer you in puris naturalibus” – he corrected himself – ”that is to say metaphorically speaking. He said that ‘the fashionable world,’ as he called it, filled him with gloom, gave him the … ah … hump, I think he said; and he was disappointed to find that you associated yourself so fully with the frivolities of society, and were so foreign to the liberties, the sincerities, of more primitive conditions. I don’t know whether I am making myself clear.“
“Perfectly,” said Muriel. “I suppose he would have preferred to see me turning head over heels in the desert in puris … what-you-said-ibus.”
“I take it,” Lord Blair explained, “that he was referring to your mental, not your physical attitude.”
“Oh, quite so,” replied Muriel; and she burst out laughing, but her laughter was very close to tears.
Lord Blair patted her cheek. “Ah, Muriel,” he said, his manner again becoming serious, “you mustn’t lose Daniel. I would rather that he were your husband than any man living.”
“But I don’t think he wants to be my husband, or anybody’s husband,” she replied.
“He is deeply in love with you,” her father told her.
“That’s another matter,” said she; and Lord Blair glanced at her in perplexity.
He was not altogether sorry that events had taken their present course; for it seemed to him that this temporary disunion would have a salutary effect on his daughter’s character. He could see clearly the faults of which Daniel complained; and he could not help thinking that this forceful show of disgust on her lover’s part would be instrumental in arousing her to the more serious things of life. It would be a lesson to her which would serve to fit her to be the wife of a man of genuine sincerity.
Moreover, in the case of Daniel, his sudden return to El Hamrân, with his heart left behind him here at the Residency, would probably dispel, once and for all, that haunting dream of his desert paradise which otherwise would always cause him to be restless in Cairo. This time, if he were made of flesh and blood, he would find the desert intolerable, and in a few weeks he would probably be lured back to civilization by the call of his manhood.
That Daniel should marry Muriel, and take up his permanent position at the Residency, was his most ardent hope; and as the present events had occurred he had fitted them each into place in his growing plan of action.
In brief, his scheme was as follows. At the end of the month he himself would have to go up to the Sudan on his annual tour of inspection; and about the same time the Bindanes would be going to the Oases. He had expected to take his daughter with him to the Sudan, but, instead, he would send her with the Bindanes, and thus she would be in a position to effect a reconciliation with Daniel on his own ground, so to speak. Hardy Muriel on camel-back in the desert would be more likely to win him than dainty Muriel in the ballroom; and Lord Blair, priding himself on his strategy, had almost come to believe that his sending Daniel off to El Hamrân had been a definite move in his game, made with the object of bringing about this romantic meeting in the desert.
He rubbed his hands together now as he prepared to tell Muriel of his plan, so far as she ought to know it.
“Now, my dear,” he said to her, “you must not fret. I have a little scheme in my mind, of which I think you will approve. I am going to try to arrange for you to go out to the Oases with our friends; and thus you will be able to see Daniel for a day or two, and, if so you wish, you will be able to make it up with him.”
He stood back from her, and beamed upon her, his hands raised as though he were beating time to a visionary orchestra. But as he saw the expression in her eyes his face fell, and his hands sank to his side. He looked at her in dismay, and the thought came into his mind that she was undoubtedly a Blair; for, like all the Blairs in a temper, she resembled a beautiful monkey. Her eyebrows were knitted, her eyes were round and wide open, her lips were pursed, and her jaw was set. He had never realized before how very attractive she was.
“Do you suppose,” she said, slowly and distinctly, “that I shall again put myself in a position to be snubbed? Do you think I would lower myself to go out to him in the desert and ask his forgiveness? No! If he wants me he can come back and ask my forgiveness.”
He watched her anxiously as she turned haughtily away. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “You both seem determined to lose one another,” he remarked; and presently, like a man who has no time to waste, he stepped back to the door and opened it.
“I never want to see him again,” said Muriel over her shoulder.
Lord Blair did not answer, but, shutting the door with a snap, left her to her bitter reflections.
Five minutes later a message was brought up from Lady Smith-Evered, who had called to consult her in regard to a proposed picnic; and Muriel therefore went downstairs to the drawing-room. There she found her imposing visitor seated upon the sofa behind a great bunch of pink peonies which stood in a vase upon a low table. She had evidently been walking in the hot sun, and her face, in spite of its powder, was itself extraordinarily suggestive of a pink peony in full bloom, so that, appearing as it seemed to do from amongst these showy flowers, it was like a burlesque of caricature of the works of nature.
“Good morning, my dear: forgive my getting up,” she said to Muriel. “Your sofa is lower than I expected.”
Muriel sat down beside her. “I think Daniel Lane must have broken the springs,” she answered. “He always used to fling himself into that corner when he had a fit of laziness.”
Lady Smith-Evered glanced at her. “Why d’you say he ‘used to’? Doesn’t he do it now?”
“He’s gone,” said Muriel. “Didn’t you know?”
“Gone?”
Muriel told her how Lord Blair had sent him off on a mission to the Oases. Her voice betrayed no trace of feeling as she explained away his sudden departure.
“Well, my dear,” said Lady Smith-Evered, “I know you and he quite like each other, but I must say I can’t understand it. I’m relieved to hear he has gone. I don’t trust him in regard to women.”
Muriel uttered a short laugh. “One might say the same of any man,” she replied.
Lady Smith-Evered looked at her curiously. “I wonder what’s the real reason of his being sent off so suddenly,” she remarked, a crafty expression coming into her face. “His going on a mission is probably only eyewash.”
Muriel shrank before her prying eyes, and a feeling of anger was awakened in her; but she only shrugged her shoulders.
“I wonder if your father has been wise enough just to dismiss him in this way,” Lady Smith-Evered mused. “I’ll find out: yes, I’ll get to the bottom of it.”
The expression of inquisitive, self-complacent cunning in the woman’s face, and her actual blindness to the real facts of the matter, combined to arouse in Muriel an uncontrollable hostility.
“Oh, you needn’t bother to find out,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand the real reason.”
“Ah, then there is a secret: I thought as much,” she replied, with a knowing smile. “There’s always a secret about the movements of such men as Mr. Lane.”
“Yes,” answered Muriel, suddenly seeing red, as the saying is; “absolute frankness and absolute honesty must always seem fishy to those who can’t conceive what such things mean. If you want to know, Daniel Lane has gone away because he was fed up with the rotten life we lead here in Cairo. The sham of it all sickened him. He has gone away to escape from the pretences and the hatefulness and the pettiness of people like you and me. He’s gone to get some fresh air: he was being suffocated here.”
Lady Smith-Evered stared at her in blank astonishment, and the pinkness of her face turned to a deeper red. “Oh, that’s what he has told you, is it?” she scoffed. “He must think you very gullible.”
Muriel rose from the sofa, and faced her visitor with blazing eyes. “I said you wouldn’t be able to understand,” she exclaimed. “There’s no mystery about it: he was just frankly disgusted, and off he went. But he’ll come back one day, when the hot weather begins and we’ve all gone home. Then he and Father will be able to get on with their work, with England’s work, without being distracted by fussy little interruptions from women like you and me…”
Lady Smith-Evered managed to raise herself with some dignity from the sofa. “I wanted to speak to you about plans,” she said, stiffly; “but that can wait now till another day. I don’t know what is the matter with you, but I know we shall quarrel if I remain. I don’t care to be spoken to as you are speaking to me.”
Her large bosom was heaving threateningly, and Muriel was abashed.
“I’m sorry,” she answered, the light of battle dying in her eyes.
Lady Smith-Evered took her departure without many more words, and thereon Muriel went directly up to her room again, her heart aching within her. Here at the open window she stood staring out across the lawn to the translucent Nile. A native boat, with huge bellying sails, was making its way slowly up stream; and she could hear the wailing song of the blue-gowned youth at the rudder. Away in the distance the Pyramids marked the edge of the placid desert, now bathed in sunlight; and above, the cloudless sky stretched in tranquil splendour.
She was ashamed of herself, ashamed of her inconsistency. Her mind was confused, but in its confusion she was conscious of one clear thought, namely that Daniel would have rebuked her for her show of temper. “Look away over there at the quiet desert,” he would have said. “Do you see how it is smiling at you for your angry thought and for that flush in your face? You won’t get at the root of things by raising your little voice in protest.”
“O Daniel, Daniel,” she whispered, her eyes filling with tears, “you oughtn’t to have left me here alone. You oughtn’t, you oughtn’t.”
And some time later, still staring out of the window, she said: “Did you go away because you wanted me to follow you? Must I humiliate myself and come to you? O Daniel, my darling, how I hate you!”
CHAPTER XXIV – THE GREAT ADVENTURE
As the days passed, and the Bindanes’ departure for the Oases drew near, Muriel’s rather feeble resolution not to accompany them steadily weakened. Lord Blair had done his best to alter her decision, and the Great Man could be a clever strategist: his daughter, indeed, would have had little chance of opposing his wishes successfully in this matter even had she battled against him with a whole heart, but in the vacillating condition to which love had brought her she had no chance at all.
“Don’t be a dam’ fool,” Kate Bindane said to her one morning at the Residency. “What’s the good of moping about outside the ropes like a heavyweight with a stomach-ache? You know you’re fed up with everybody here: Gor’ blimy! – why don’t you swallow your maidenly pride, and put on the gloves, and have three rounds with Fate? It’s better to be counted out than never to have boxed at all. Tennyson.”
Thus it came about that at the end of February, when Lord Blair took the train southwards upon his journey to the Sudan, Lady Muriel set out westwards as a member of the Bindanes’ elaborate caravan. The start was made one morning from Mena House, and so great was the general confusion and hullabaloo that Muriel’s thoughts did not begin to clarify themselves until a ride of two hours had brought them to the rocky valley wherein they halted to eat their luncheon.
Here, seating herself upon the rocks at the foot of the cliff, she shaded her eyes with her hand, and surveyed the animated scene with amused interest. There was Kate, in a white coat and skirt, and a sun-helmet, stumping over the sand to cure the “pins-and-needles” from which she was suffering; her husband, in a grey flannel suit and a green-veiled helmet, was still seated upon his camel as though he had forgotten to dismount; his man, Dixon, rather fat and red, and wearing his new gaiters apparently back to front, was hastening to his master’s assistance; and the two imposing native dragomans, in silks all aflutter in the wind, were shouting unnecessary orders to the Egyptian cook and sofragi to hasten the luncheon.
A few yards down the valley a khaki-clad Egyptian police-officer, wearing his red tarboush, or fez, at a rakish angle, was giving instructions to his four negro troopers; a fat native gentleman from the Ministry of Agriculture was mopping his forehead as he stood beside his grumbling camel, and the Egyptian secretary to the party, a dapper youth with mud-coloured complexion and coal-black eyes, had just thrown himself down in the shade and had removed the tarboush from his close-cropped head, in conscious defiance of local etiquette.
The baggage camels, carrying the camp equipment, the stores, and the tanks of water, were lurching at a walking pace along the valley, led by blue-robed camel-men, under the orders of the caravan-master, a grey-bearded Arab who rode sleepily at the head of the line. These were not to halt at the midday hour, but, pushing ahead, they would be overtaken later in the day by the swifter riding-camels; and Muriel watched them now as they slowly jogged along the little-used track between the yellow cliffs, the brilliant sun striking down upon them from a deep blue sky in which compact little bundles of snow-white cloud went scudding past.
There was a boisterous breeze blowing, and the tingling glow of the sun and wind upon her cheeks, as she sat perched high upon the rocks, seemed to match the exhilaration of her heart. The morning’s ride had shaken her brain free from the heavy gloom of the last three weeks; and already the shining open spaces of the desert had produced their effect upon her, so that she felt as though her mind had had a cold bath.
It was good to be up and doing; it was good to be setting out upon this adventure, the ambiguousness of which seemed every moment to be growing less disconcerting; it was good to be in this great playground where the rules of her life’s schoolroom were mainly in abeyance. Up here in these splendid spaces it would not matter if she pulled her skirt off, or let her hair down, or turned a cartwheel, or stood on her head. Already she was whistling loudly, and throwing fragments of stone into the valley before her, in the manner of a child upon the seashore; and all her love-sick sorrows of yesterday seemed to have vanished in the exaltation of youth and youth’s well-being.
She watched the servants, in the distance at the other side of the valley, spreading the picnic luncheon on a white tablecloth laid upon a shaded patch of sand; and when at length the meal appeared to be ready, she took a flying leap down from the rock where she had been sitting, and landed sprawling upon the sand-drift below. The sensation pleased her, and, clambering up the rocks once more, she repeated the jump, this time arriving with a considerable thud upon her back, and sliding down the drift with her legs in the air.
She hopped across the valley, rubbing herself, and was presently joined by the Bindanes.
“I feel about twelve years old,” she told them; and indeed at the moment she did not look much more than that age. “The desert is having an extraordinary effect on me.”
“But we’re only ten or twelve miles into it so far,” said the practical Kate. “You wait another week…”
“If I go on at this rate,” Muriel laughed, “I’ll be in arms by the time we reach the Oases.”
“I wonder whose,” muttered Kate, with a smile; but her friend’s face at once became serious. It was a jarring note, and it nearly ruined the joviality of the picnic.
The afternoon ride carried them another fifteen miles; and towards sunset they came to a halt in the midst of a wide flat plain of sand, across which a winding ribbon of stunted tamarisks and sparse vegetation marked the bed of a primeval river now reduced to a mere subterranean infiltration. In the far distance on all sides the low hills hemmed them in, like a rugged wall encircling a sacred and enchanted area.
The tents were pitched amongst the low-growing bushes in the dry, shingly bed of the stream; and the hobbled camels were turned loose to crop such twigs and grasses as they found edible. Muriel, meanwhile, wandered away into the open desert; and presently, like warm sand, and resting her chin on her hands, watched the sun go down behind the purple hills.
For some time the excitements of the day, and the physical exhilaration produced by her long ride in the sun and wind, held her from thought. But at length the dreamlike silence of the wilderness, the amazing sense of isolation from the outside world, began to release her mind from the captivity of the flesh, so that becoming one with the immensity of nature, her spirit drifted out into the sunset with the freedom of light or air.
The little deeds of all her yesterdays appeared suddenly insignificant to her, and she began to feel that life, and the happiness of life, was something far greater than she had supposed. She wondered why she had been troubled with regard to Daniel: he was just an expression of nature, as she was: and here, in the solitude he so dearly loved, she seemed to understand for the first time his scorn of the intricacies of modern civilization. Here all was so simple, so devoid of complexities, that she laughed aloud. It was only her wits, the mere fringe of her mind, which had veiled her spirit from his spirit; but now she had shaken herself loose from these ornamentations of life, and stood as it were, revealed like a lost fragment dropped at last into place in the great design.
She rose to her feet at length, with a sense of light-heartedness such as she had never before known; and, returning to the camp in the gathering dusk, she looked with amused pity at Benifett Bindane who sat in a deck-chair reading the Financial News by the light of a glass-protected candle.
“Just look at him!” said Kate, who, herself, had been admiring the sunset. “Isn’t it pitiful?”
Mr. Bindane laid the paper down, and stared at his wife with uncomprehending eyes.
“The market is showing a good deal of weakness in Home Rails,” he said to his wife; “but your South Africans are all buoyant enough, so you needn’t worry.”
“Worry!” exclaimed Kate, contemptuously, and turned from him to the fading light in the west.
“I’m glad I bought those Nitrates,” he went on, addressing the back of her neck; “they’re improving, so far as one can tell from the closing quotations given here.”
He held the newspaper out, but she struck at it viciously with her hand.
“Oh, for God’s sake shut up!” she cried. “It’s money, money, money all the time with you.”
“I was speaking,” he said, very slowly, and as though he had been hurt, “of stock I had bought for you, my dear.”
Kate turned to him, and her friend observed that her face softened, as though at the thought that in his own way he was showing his affection for her. But the picture was, nevertheless, pathetic; and the recollection passed through Muriel’s mind, in sudden illumination, that Daniel was entirely free from financial interests. So long as he earned a reasonable living he never seemed to trouble himself about money.
Next morning they were in the saddle by eight o’clock, while yet the sun was low in the heavens and the air cold and sharp. Crossing the wide plain in which they had camped, they passed into the echoing valleys amongst the hills; and for the next three days they made their way through rugged and broken country, now mounting some eminence whence they surveyed a wide prospect in which range behind range of rugged peaks was revealed to them, now losing themselves in the intricate valleys, where they rode in the blue shadow of the cliffs, and where the sound of their voices and their laughter was flung back at them from the walls of rock.
Each night they camped beside some water-hole or well, known by name to their guides, but which to them seemed to be a deserted and unvisited place, frequented only by the unseen gazelle whose footprints were marked upon the sand. It was cold here in the high ground, and they were glad of all the blankets which they had brought; but in the mornings the sun soon warmed them, and by noon they were glad to take their rest in the shade.
It was in the afternoon of the fifth day of their journey that, descending from the higher level, they came into sight of the little Oasis of El Homra, set like an emerald in the golden bowl of the desert. Muriel was riding beside Kate Bindane when, emerging from the maze of the hills, they first looked down into this wide basin in the centre of which the Oasis was situated; and both she and her friend uttered a cry of delight.
In the case of Muriel the ejaculation was a response to the grandeur of the scene; but in that of her friend the exclamation was one of devout thankfulness that the outward journey was nearing its end. Being heavily built and somewhat stout Kate had suffered very much more severely from the long-protracted jolting than she had been willing to admit; and there were many very sore places upon her body which caused the thought of much further exercise of this kind to be intolerable.