When she awoke the tent was light and the moving shadows of cedar boughs on the white canvas told that the sun was straight above.  Carley ached as never before.  A deep pang seemed invested in every bone.  Her heart felt swollen out of proportion to its space in her breast.  Her breathing came slow and it hurt.  Her blood was sluggish.  Suddenly she shut her eyes.  She loathed the light of day.  What was it that had happened?

Then the brutal truth flashed over her again, in aspect new, with all the old bitterness.  For an instant she experienced a suffocating sensation as if the canvas had sagged under the burden of heavy air and was crushing her breast and heart.  Then wave after wave of emotion swept over her.  The storm winds of grief and passion were loosened again.  And she writhed in her misery.

Some one knocked on her door.  The Mexican woman called anxiously.  Carley awoke to the fact that her presence was not solitary on the physical earth, even if her soul seemed stricken to eternal loneliness.  Even in the desert there was a world to consider.  Vanity that had bled to death, pride that had been crushed, availed her not here.  But something else came to her support.  The lesson of the West had been to endure, not to shirk—­to face an issue, not to hide.  Carley got up, bathed, dressed, brushed and arranged her dishevelled hair.  The face she saw in the mirror excited her amaze and pity.  Then she went out in answer to the call for dinner.  But she could not eat.  The ordinary functions of life appeared to be deadened.

The day happened to be Sunday, and therefore the workmen were absent.  Carley had the place to herself.  How the half-completed house mocked her!  She could not bear to look at it.  What use could she make of it now?  Flo Hutter had become the working comrade of Glenn Kilbourne, the mistress of his cabin.  She was his wife and she would be the mother of his children.

That thought gave birth to the darkest hour of Carley Burch’s life.  She became possessed as by a thousand devils.  She became merely a female robbed of her mate.  Reason was not in her, nor charity, nor justice.  All that was abnormal in human nature seemed coalesced in her, dominant, passionate, savage, terrible.  She hated with an incredible and insane ferocity.  In the seclusion of her tent, crouched on her bed, silent, locked, motionless, she yet was the embodiment of all terrible strife and storm in nature.  Her heart was a maelstrom and would have whirled and sucked down to hell all the beings that were men.  Her soul was a bottomless gulf, filled with the gales and the fires of jealousy, superhuman to destroy.

That fury consumed all her remaining strength, and from the relapse she sank to sleep.

Morning brought the inevitable reaction.  However long her other struggles, this monumental and final one would be brief.  She realized that, yet was unable to understand how it could be possible, unless shock or death or mental aberration ended the fight.  An eternity of emotion lay back between this awakening of intelligence and the hour of her fall into the clutches of primitive passion.