lessness, she loved it more than ever now; its beauty, its vastness, its wildness, its teeming, marvellous life. Its magic had conquered many men who, once having known it, could not be content anywhere else. Now that magic was at work upon Jolie Stanwicke; and more and more often, when her thoughts went back to the little fields and the quiet hedgerows of England, she wondered how she could find contentment there again.
And there was something even deeper than this magic of the wilderness. These men with whom her lot was cast in this strange adventure—three of them had become a part of herself, her mind, her soul. O'Sullivan, with his quick humour, his infectious smile, his bird's voice and his stout heart, his sprightly tales of the days when he was a fencing master in Paris, his light love songs, and his beautiful and noble stories of the ancients, of Great Olympus and the golden age of Greece and Rome; Almayne, in appearance a rude wilderness hunter, blunt, hard as flint, irritable at times, pitiless towards his enemies, scornful of all softness, yet a man of fine texture under his rough exterior and—now that she had conquered his antagonism—as tender to her as a kinsman; Lachlan McDonald. . . .
So it was no pale, drooping flower that bloomed on the rocky summit of Sani'gilagi above the miasma of war which was spread over all the wilderness below. The girl who had come so strangely to live for a time
