Page:Neith Boyce--The bond.djvu/301

Rh the angry camels, the long march made on the Arab fare of dates and coarse bread, the blazing sun—and she saw herself there with Crayven. It was an image so clear, so vivid, that she shut her eyes and bowed her head on her hands. … She thought coolly, as she went in to bed, that when he did go, as he must soon, she would miss him enormously. The accident of the day had moved her to a keener feeling about him. If the avalanche had caught him instead of the two Frenchmen—no, she said to herself, it could not have made any great difference to her. All the same, she was glad that he was alive, and that she was to see him the next day.

They started at ten in the morning for a long walk, meaning to lunch at a chalet up in the mountains. The day was glorious—clear, warm, and fresh. Teresa, in her short white dress, with a sweater tied round her waist—for they were going up into the snow—felt once more young, vigorous, and gay. She sang a little as they walked along the road between the flowery meadows, which the peasants were beginning now to mow—dull, unpicturesque figures, like automatons wound up to a slow, steady motion of the arm and the scythe.

"They are exactly like their cows," she said lightly. "It's strange they should be brutalised so by all this nature. It excites me, stimulates