This delay of the
expeditionary party was due to no fault of its secretary. During the
past four days she had proposed the search for the trail four times,
one proposal per day. And each day the chief expeditioner had voted
a postponement. The chief expeditioner was lazy. At least that was
the excuse he made. And Desire, who was not lazy, might have fretted
at the inaction had she believed him. But she knew it was not
laziness which had drawn certain new lines about the expeditioner's
mouth and deepened the old ones on his forehead. It was not laziness
which lay behind the strained look in his eyes and the sudden return
of his almost vanished limp. These things are not symptoms of
indolence. They are symptoms of nerves. And Desire knew something of
nerves. What she did not know, in the present case, was their
exciting cause. Neither could she understand this new reticence on
the part of their victim nor his reluctance to admit the obvious.
She puzzled much about these problems while the lazy one rested in
the sun and the quiet, golden days wrought the magic of their cure.
And Spence, mere man that he was, fancied that she noticed nothing.
The pleasant illusion hastened his recovery. It tended to restore a
complacency, rudely disturbed by an enforced realization of his own
back-sliding. He had been quite furious upon discovering that the
"little episode" of the moonlit cottage had filched from him all his
new won strength and nervous stamina, leaving him sleepless and
unstrung, ready to jump at the rattling of a stone.
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