Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/271

 I'm not surprised you don't know anything about his business."

With this she walked abruptly from the tent.

Fay hardened and blazed over what she deemed the gratuitous affront in this remark, but nothing at all adequate rose to her tongue to hurl after that indignant squeak of Eleanor's climbing boots. Yet what she flamed with most hotly was resentment toward her husband. And at first this was not for putting her in a position where a woman like Eleanor could talk to her as she had just done. It was for his selfishness in stealing away. Didn't he perceive that she was enjoying Sir Brian and his hunt immensely? Didn't he know that it was her ambition to kill a mountain sheep and that her host had pledged his honor as a sportsman that she should have her chance? And was the man too crass not to understand that she couldn't clamber over these wild and lonely crags with another unless a husband were at least in the same county, thereby lending his official countenance to the inevitable intimacies of such association? Why, he had practically abandoned her to Sir Brian!

But at length the pendulum began to swing the other way, and she found herself staring wide-eyed and thoughtful at the brown, sloping roof of the tent which came so near to her as she lay.

"Lost money? . . ." she was questioning the