Page:The Cave Girl - Edgar Rice Burroughs.pdf/117

 It presently occurred to him that by the traitorous attack which he believed that she had made upon him while he was acting in her defense she had forfeited every claim which her former kindness might have given her upon him, but with this realization came another—a humiliating thought—he still wished to see her!

He, Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones, had become so devoid of pride that he would voluntarily searchout one who had wronged and outraged his friendship, with the avowed determination of seeking a reconciliation. It was unthinkable, and yet, as he admitted the impossibility of it, he set forth in search of her.

Waldo wondered not a little at the strange emotion—inherent gregarious instinct, he thought it—which drew him toward Nadara.

It did not occur to him that during all the past solitary months he had scarcely missed the old companionship of his Back Bay friends; that for once that they had been the subject of his reveries the cave girl had held the center of that mental stage a thousand times.

He failed to realize that it was not the companionship of the many that he craved; that it was not the community instinct, or that his strange longing could be satisfied by but a single individual. No, Waldo Emerson did not know what was the