"I am chronically devoted to you, coeur de mon coeur," he declared in all sincerity. "That is the only form of it I have yet known."

His reward was a butterfly kiss between the eyebrows.

"Out of your own mouth you stand condemned! It is quite charming for me; and for the rest—one accepts the unavoidable! But in sober prosaic truth, Michel, Elsie Mayhew is a great deal too good for you; and that nice Engineer boy, Mr Malcolm, is desperately in earnest about her, I have seen his whole heart in his eyes when he looks at her——"

"Mais, ma chere, what a serious derangement of his organism!" Michael broke in with irreverent laughter. "When all's said, the heart is a practical machine—even the heart of a lover, and a little of it must have been left below for pumping purposes!"

She stamped her foot in helpless irritation.

"Michel, how exasperating you are! Can't you see that I am in earnest?"

"Like my incomparable rival?" he queried unabashed. "Poor devil! I wish him no harm. Is it my fault, after all, if the lady prefers a man who is not cut out on a pattern, and filed for reference at the War Office? He is immaculate, ce cher Malcolm, from his parting to the toes of his boots. And, ma foi, he is clean—like all that redoubtable army of British officers—aggressively clean, inside and out, which one cannot always say with truth! But he has no finesse, no savoir faire where women are concerned. If he is in earnest let him try weapons more compelling than his beaux yeux. A man was not given lips and a pair of hands for eating and fighting merely; and if he cannot turn them to good account, he deserves the fate that will assuredly be his."

Quita's sigh, as she turned impatiently away, may have arisen from a passing thought of that other, who had also been remiss in putting lips and hands to their legitimate use, and had reaped disaster accordingly. She took off her helmet, as if suddenly aware of its weight, and tossed it into a chair.

"Is Miss Mayhew giving you another sitting after our sunrise picnic, on Dynkund, to-morrow?" she asked in a changed voice.

"Yes, and I intend that she shall stay on for tiffin also."

"Then I will persuade Major Garth to follow suit, so that we may be a parti carre. And now, as it's more than half-past breakfast-time, we might begin to think about sitting down! I believe Major Garth is riding up this morning with some books I lent him, and I must get forward a little with my picture before he comes."

"His office hours seem to have become a negligible quantity lately," Maurice remarked casually, his eyes on Elsie's face.

"Yes, I told him so a few days ago, apparently without much effect. Major Garth is one of those men who combine a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of work with the capacity for securing good appointments, which is quite an achievement—of its kind. I suppose I must gently point out to him that now the station is waking up it would be well to consider the proprieties a little more than we have done so far; or the 'Button Quail' will be forbidding Elsie the house. She is volubly disapproving already, denounces him as a 'dangerous man' . . . delectable adjective! But the cackle of Quails is nothing to me. So long as the man behaves himself, and amuses me, I shall continue to see just as much of him as I think fit."

Major Garth, it may be mentioned in passing, had lately secured the coveted post of Station Staff Officer. He also had spent the winter months in Dalhousie; and he could by no means be reckoned among the men who fail with women through undue fastidiousness in regard to ways and means.



CHAPTER IV.

"A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter."—Eccles.

"Tired already? Nonsense! The air at this height is pure elixir vitae. It gives one a foretaste of the joy of being disembodied! I feel five years younger since I left the bungalow."

"And I, on the other hand, feel uncomfortably aware that I shall never see the forty-third milestone again!" And, seating himself deliberately on the trunk of a fallen deodar, James Garth looked up at his companion, where she stood above him on a rough-hewn block of granite, her alpenstock held high like a shepherd's crook, the slender, shapely form of her outlined upon a sky already athrill with the foreknowledge of dawn.

Standing thus, lightly poised, impatient of delay, slim and upright as a young birch-tree, a cluster of roses at her waist, her expressive face shadowed by the wide-brimmed helmet, she appeared triumphantly, girlishly young, for all her eight-and-twenty years. Her cheeks glowed; irrepressible animation sparkled in her eyes. The shock and jar of twenty-four hours ago seemed forgotten, as though they had never been, for Quita Maurice was blessed with the happy faculty of living vividly and exclusively in the present, and the exhilaration of ascent, the prospect of watching the world's awakening from a pine-crowned pinnacle, nine thousand feet up, were, for the moment, all-sufficing.

James Garth, in his upward glance, appraised every detail of her dress and person; savoured to the full her very individual—if, at times, thorn-set—charm. He was a connoisseur of woman—of their moods, their minor vanities, their methods of defence and attack—this man whose career had been mainly remarkable for a succession of sentimental friendship, innocuous and otherwise.

During the past air months he had spent an infinite deal of leisure in a pastime whose every move and countermove he knew by heart, and for the first time in eighteen years he had found himself out of his reckoning.

An element little known to him had upset the balance of power. He was beginning to be aware that, for all his unquenchable self-assurance, he had never for one moment felt sure of this woman, whose companionship was so accessible, and whose inner self stood always just out of reach, airy, impregnable, and by a natural sequence, the more entirely desirable. It had taken Garth some months to realise the truth: and on this morning of golden promise he decided that Quita Maurice must be made to realise it also.

Quita herself, meeting the eloquence of his eyes with that frank look of hers which had been largely responsible for the unprecedented turn of affairs, was vainly trying to repress a mischievous enjoyment of the fact that her companion was patently out of his element; that his drawing-room attitudes and demeanour struck an almost ludicrous note of discord with the untamed majesty of his surroundings.

Face, figure, and point-device attire, culminating in a buttonhole of freshly picked violets, stamped him as a man mentally and physically addicted to the levels of life; a soldier of carpet conquests and ball-room achievements. A brow not ill-formed, and a bold pair of eyes, more green than brown, suggested some measure of cultivated intelligence, without which Quita could not have endured his companionship for many hours together. But the proportions of his thick-set figure, and a certain amplitude of chin and jaw, bewrayed him; classed him indubitably with the type for whom comfort and leisure are the first and last words of life. The fact that he had ascended a matter of fifteen hundred feet before daybreak, and that with no more than the mildest sense of martyrdom, was proof conclusive that the balance of power had been very completely upset; and it is quite in keeping with the delicate irony of things that the one woman who had succeeded in upsetting it was, at that moment, dissecting him with the merciless accuracy of the artist.

"Poor man!" she remarked, sympathetically. "I'm afraid I have been treating you rather mercilessly; and you don't look particularly happy sitting on that deodar, either! I suppose I may consider it something of a triumph to have dragged a high priest of the arm-chair unprotesting up to the heights at this unearthly hour of the morning?"

"A triumph exclusively your own," he answered, with lingering emphasis. "No other woman in the world could have achieved as much."

Quita glanced at him quizzically.

"I honestly wonder," she said slowly, "if you could reckon up at random how many times you have said that sort of thing before."

Garth reddened visibly; less at the justice of the retort than at the humiliation of being put out of countenance by a woman from whom he desired no less a gift than the gift of herself.

"Well, I never meant it fair and square before," he declared stoutly. Whereat, to his consternation, she laughed outright.

"You seem to have a high opinion of my powers of credulity! That is too big a compliment for me to digest without salt! But I think we have talked nonsense enough for one while, and it's growing lighter every minute. Are you coming on? Or would you sooner sit there in peace while I push up to the top?"

The suggestion brought him to his feet.

"No, by no means. When I set out to do a thing, I go through with it."

"Rally your forces, then, for one more spurt of climbing. Time is precious. Can you really manage this formidable boulder, or would you like a hand up?"

She laughingly flung out her free left hand; and the mockery in her clear voice fired the man to make good his opportunity. He took prompt possession of the proffered hand, crushing it in his with unnecessary force, but made no attempt to scale the rock; while she, instantly perceiving his manoeuvre, sprang down to his side and freed herself with imperious decision. Then she turned upon him, her head held high, a spark of genuine scorn in her eyes; and he realised that he was dealing with no mere coquette, whose elusiveness might be taken as an inverted form of encouragement, but with a woman of character and spirit.

"Major Garth," she said in a tone of quietness more cutting than anger, "when I pay a man the compliment of going out alone with him, I take it for granted that he is in the habit of behaving like a gentleman. I should be sorry to find myself mistaken in your case."

Without giving him time to answer, she leapt lightly on to her deserted rock, leaving him to follow, if he chose.

And he did choose. For her scorn, while it stung his vanity to the quick, fired his lukewarm blood with a lust of conquest far removed from his usual cool-headed assurance at the critical moment. He seemed destined to experience more than one new sensation this morning; and new sensations rarely came amiss to this epicure of the emotions.

Being quite incapable of emulating his companion's chamois method of cutting corners, and striking out a direct line for the summit, he did not succeed in coming up with her till the arduous feat was accomplished,—the Pisgah height attained. Here he found her established on a slab of granite, hands loosely clasped over her knee, helmet tilted a little backward, forming a halo round her head and face. He arrived in a very unheroic state of breathlessness, and she greeted him with a frankly forgiving smile.

"That last bit came rather hard on you, I'm afraid. But surely all this makes ample amends."

She included in a wide sweep of her arm the superb panorama of hill and valley and far-stretching plain, robed in a haze of its own tierce breath, through which a silver network of rivers could be faintly discerned in the crescent light. Uprising from this blue interminable distance, the first crumplings of the foothills showed like purple velvet, and from these again the giant Himalayas—the "home of the greater gods"—sprang aloft, in a medley of lovely lines and hues, till they reached the uttermost north where the hoar head of Nanga Parbat soared twenty-five thousand feet into the blue.

Quita motioned her companion to another rock, a little distance behind her own.

"Sit down there, and recover your lost breath," she commanded, gently. "I would rather not talk for the present, if you don't mind. It would jar somehow. I daresay you understand what I mean."

He was many leagues removed from understanding: but he obeyed in silence, wondering at himself, no less than at her. And straightway Quita forgot all about him, in the mere rapture of looking, and of feeling in every fibre the incommunicable thrill of dawn.

A passionate nobility, freedom, and power breathed from the wide scene. Already a pearly glimmer pulsed along the east; already the mountains were awake and aware. Peak beyond peak, range beyond range, a shadowy pageant of purple and grey, they swept upwards to the far horizon, where the still wonder of the snows shone pale and pure against the dovelike tones of the sky. Away across the valley, where night still brooded, Kalatope ridge, serrated and majestic of outline, made a massive incident of shadow amid the tenderer tints around. The great hushed world seemed holding its breath in expectation of a miracle—the unconsidered miracle of dawn.

A Himalayan dawn is brief, as it is beautiful. One after one, the snow-peaks passed from the pallor of death to the glow of life. Then, sudden as an inspiration, the full splendour of morning broke, sublime as the eternity from which it came. Rapier-like shafts of light pierced the purple lengths of shadows that engulfed the valley. Threading their way through fir and deodar and pine, they flung all their radiant length across a rock-studded carpet of fir-needles and moss, and rested, like a caress, upon Quita's face and figure.

At last, with a long breath of satisfaction, she forced her sun-dazzled eyes and mind back to earth; only to discover that Garth had risen and was standing at her side. The man had seen and studied her in many moods. But never in one so exalted, so self-forgetful, as the present; and to the varied new experiences of the morning was added a wholesome sense of his own unworthiness to lay a hand upon her. In that illumined moment he was vouchsafed a glimpse into the temple of Love; a temple he had desecrated and defiled time and again; whose holy of holies he had never entered, nor ever could.

"Does it really mean as much as all that to you?" he asked, still watching her, with unusual concentration.

She nodded, and a soft light gleamed in her eyes. "Yes—as much as that, and more—infinitely more. One's cramped mind and heart seem to need expanding to take it all in."

Garth's smile lacked its habitual touch of cynicism.

"I am afraid even sunrise on Dynkund in your company has no power to lift me to such flights of ecstasy."

"I never supposed it had, you poor fellow! I wouldn't change souls with you for half a kingdom. Nearly every day of my life I thank the goodness and the grace that dowered me with the spirit of an artist. Think what a heritage it is to be eternally interested in a world full of people who seem to be eternally bored!"

"I suppose you include me in that noble army of martyrs?"

"Decidedly. It is one of your worst faults."

"At least I never commit it in your presence."

She laughed, and lifted her shoulders.

"At least you know how to flatter a woman! But, for goodness' sake, don't let's talk trivialities in the face of these stupendous mountains."

"And why not? In my opinion, the trivialities of a human being are worth more than the grandeur of a mountain, any day. But, seriously, Miss Maurice—if you can be serious with me for five minutes—does all this, and the Art in which you live and breathe, so satisfy you that you feel no need for the far better things a man might have to offer you?"

She frowned, and looked with sudden intentness at a distant, abject in the valley.

"Yes—seriously—it does. What is more, it seems to me that most men set too high a value on what they have to offer a woman, and that a good many of us are better off without it."

Garth set his teeth, and did not answer at once. That his first genuine attempt at a proposal of marriage should be thus cavalierly nipped in the bud was disconcerting, to say the least of it.

"But not you—of all women," he protested, incredulously. "Are you quite sure you understand what I mean? Won't you give me a chance to explain——?"

Her low laughter maddened him.

"Oh, no—please have mercy on me! Explanations are the root of all evil! If only people had not such a passion for explaining themselves, there would be fifty per cent fewer misunderstandings in the world. Don't you know the delightful story of a zealous mother reading the Bible to her boy, and explaining profusely to bring it within the scope of his small mind, and when she asked him, anxiously, 'Are you quite sure you understand it all, darling?' he answered, with the heavenly frankness of childhood, 'Yes, beautifully, mummy—except when you explain.' That's my feeling exactly; so we'll skip the explanations, if you don't mind."

He stifled an oath, and flung his half-smoked cigar down the khud.

"You're enough to drive a sane man distracted!" he declared hotly, and was not a little surprised at his own vehemence.

"No, no! That's exaggeration, I assure you. The strong wine of the morning has got into your head. Do be reasonable now, and keep personalities at arm's length. I detest them."

He moved away for a space; then, turning on his heel, came back again.

"At least you don't object to my companionship?" he said, ignoring her request.

"Of course not, so long as it amuses you to bestow it upon me."

"Amuses me! God in heaven, what makes you so hopelessly detached?"

"Some radical defect in me, I suppose. The Pagan strain, perhaps, that comes out so strong in Michael. I believe I am incapable of les grandes passions. But that does not prevent me from being a good friend, and a constant one, as you will find, if you care to test me in that capacity. Now you may sit down here," she patted her slab of rock invitingly, "and discourse about anything you please, except myself. Egoist though I am, I have had enough of the subject for to-day!"

And Garth—the man of surface emotions and ready tongue—found nothing to say in answer to this kindly but inexorable dismissal of his unspoken suit. He had no choice but to accept the inevitable, and the proffered seat. But the permission to discourse about anything he pleased left him dumb, and it was Quita herself who guided their talk into a less personal channel.

"Have you had any new arrivals at the Strawberry Bank lately?" she asked, conversationally; and the question was more relevant to the tabooed topic than Garth was likely to guess. He lived close to the hotel, and dined there when he felt convivially disposed.

"Yes; two new fellows came up this week. A doctor from Mooltan and a Gunner from 'Dera Dismal,'—the Thibet man,—Lenox, who seems to be making a reputation of sorts. But he looks a wreck. Smokes like a chimney; and is apparently working himself to death; a thankless form of folly."

"Perhaps. Yet India needs a few unsparing workers—like Captain Lenox."

She spoke with studied indifference; but her fingers were busy uprooting a patch of moss.

"Oh yes, India has a healthy appetite for unsparing workers! She is a grasping harridan, who demands all and offers nothing. She devours the lives of men who are foolish enough to lose their hearts to her, and wrecks their bodies by way of thanks."

Quita's lips lifted in the merest shadow of a smile. "Aren't you a little ungrateful to her? She has been fairly merciful to you!"

"I have never given her the ghost of a chance to be otherwise! I don't believe in overwork, plus the Indian climate. More men kill themselves by a happy mixture of both than the importance of their achievements justifies. I was chaffing Lenox only last night about his leaning towards that unrecognised form of suicide; and all the answer I got was that a man might die of a more degrading disease. You never by any chance get a rise out of old Lenox!"

"Do you know him well?"

"As well as it's possible to know a fellow who lives with all his shutters up. And in any case an anchorite, and a woman-hater, would never be much in my line. The symptoms appear to have developed in the last few years. Not without reason, as I happen to know."

"What do you happen to know?"

The question came almost in a whisper; but Garth, who had all a woman's weakness for other people's affairs, was too intent upon his ill-gotten scrap of gossip to observe his companion's slight change of manner.

"Why, that it's simply a case of cherchez la femme, as usual," he answered, lightly. "I believe it's a fact that he went so far as to marry one of these women he affects to despise, when he was on leave five years ago."

Quita started, and bit her lips. "What reason can you have for believing anything . . . so improbable?"

"My dear lady, marriage is never improbable. You women have a knack of tripping up the most unlikely subjects! In this case, I had the details from an old friend of mine. She happened to be stopping at the same hotel as Lenox at Zermatt. Then one morning he disappeared; and, as she had taken rather a fancy to him, she tried to find out what had become of him. After a good deal of questioning, it transpired that he had been seen coming out of the English church with a lady; and further inquiry revealed the fact that an officer named Lenox had been quietly married there the day before. Naturally, she scented a romance, and was keen to know more. But he seemed to have vanished outright. Then ten days later she met him on the station platform, travelling alone, and obviously down on his luck. He told her he was off to join his battery in India: nothing more. Problem: What, in the name of mystery, had he done with the lady?"

At that Quita rose abruptly, her cheeks on fire, her whole frame tense with suppressed agitation.

"Oh, stop—stop. I can't stand any more!" she protested, in a smothered voice; and at once Garth was beside her, contrite and amazed.

"Miss Maurice—what have I said to upset you so?"

"It's not your fault. You couldn't help it," she answered, without looking up. "But—you were telling me my own story!"

"Good Lord! Then—it was you?"

"Don't say any more, please. I never meant to speak; only—one had to stop you—somehow. It's time we went back to the others now. I am sure you must be wanting your breakfast. And remember"—she faced him at last, with brave deliberation—"I trust you, as a gentleman, never to speak of this again—to me, or to any one else."

And Garth bowed his head, and followed her, in a bewildered silence.



CHAPTER V.

"He that getteth a wife beginneth a possession; a help like unto himself, and a pillar of rest."—Ecclesiasticus.

Eldred Lenox stood alone in the Desmonds' diminutive drawing-room, patiently impatient for companionship more responsive than that of cane chairs and tables, pictures and a piano. Yet the room itself, with its atmosphere of peace and refinement, gave him a foretaste of the restfuluess that made Honor Desmond's companionship a growing necessity to this man, whose heart and brain were in a state of civil war. It was filled with afternoon sunlight, with the faint, clean fragrance of violets, wild roses, and maiden-hair fern, and its emptiness was informed and pervaded by countless suggestions of a woman's presence; a woman versed in that finest of all fine arts, the beautifying of daily life.

In this era of hotels, clubs, and motors, of days spent in sowing hurry and reaping shattered nerves, the type is growing rarer, and it will be an ill day for England's husbands and sons, nay, for her supremacy among nations, if it should ever become extinct. For it is no over-statement, but simple fact, that the women who follow, soon or late, in the track of her victorious arms, women of Honor Desmond's calibre—home-loving, home-making, skilled in the lore of heart and spirit—have done fully as much to establish, strengthen, and settle her scattered Empire as shot, or steel, or the doubtful machinations of diplomacy.

A half-acknowledged conviction of this truth was undermining Eldred's skin-deep cynicism; and it did not tend to alleviate his renewed sense of loss. A week had passed since his astounding experience on the Kajiar Road; a week in which the hours of sleep had been a more negligible quantity than usual; in which he had fought squarely against an imperative need to escape from the haunting consciousness of his wife's presence, and had been squarely beaten. His present need to see and speak with Honor Desmond was an ultimate confession of that defeat.

On reaching the bungalow, he was told that the Mem-sahib bad gone out with the Chota Sahib, but would doubtless be back before long, and had decided to await her return. During his ride with her that morning, he had not been able to bring himself to speak. But this time he intended to go through with the ordeal. He felt too restless to sit down; and she did not keep him waiting long.

Footsteps and low voices, punctuated with silver laughter, heralded her coming, and a few minutes later she entered, carrying a pocket edition of herself, who clung about her neck, and pressed a cool rose-petal cheek against her own.

Lenox had described her as a magnificent woman. A Scot may generally be trusted not to overstate his facts; and certainly Honor Desmond, in those radiant early days of marriage, deserved no less an adjective. Height, and a buoyant stateliness of bearing, lent a regal quality to her beauty. Her grey-blue eyes under very level brows were the eyes of a woman dwelling in the heart of life, not merely in its outskirts and pleasure-grounds.

She expressed no surprise at seeing Lenox again so soon. Come when he might, his presence was accepted as a matter of course; the surest way to put a man at his ease.

"So sorry I kept you waiting," she said simply, and the hand she gave him was at once soft and strong,—an epitome of the woman. "Theo was lunching out with Colonel Mayhew—they are both very full of that book of his on the Hill Tribes—and I have been devoting most of my time to this very exacting person!"

Lenox caressed the child's red-gold hair with a cautious reverent hand, and a contraction of envy at his heart.

"What a beautiful little chap he is! Begins to look an out-and-out Meredith already. Desmond must be tremendously proud of him."

She smiled and pressed him closer.

"He is; and I'm nearly as bad! One son, three fools, you know! Poor little Paul, it's not fair to call him names when he can't hit back."

"You called him after Wyndham?"

"Yes. They're like brothers, those two. Now let me get rid of him, and we'll have a quiet talk till Theo comes back. Sit down and smoke, please."

He complied; and she, returning, established herself beside her work-table, and took up an elaborate bit of smocking without question or remark.

His trouble and stress of mind were very evident to her; but she was one of those rare women who are chary of questions—who, for all their desire to help and serve, never approach too near, or say the word too much, which was, perhaps, one reason why men found her so restful, and instinctively talked to her about themselves.

But Lenox was long in beginning.

By imperceptible degrees, this unsought gift of friendship was melting the morsel of ice at his heart; was reviving in him, against his will, that keen appreciation of a cultivated woman's sympathy and companionship, which, among finely tempered men, is as potent a factor in the shaping of destinies as passion, or hot-headed emotion.

For a while he permitted himself the bitter-sweet satisfaction of merely watching her where she sat, in a shaft of sunlight, that struck golden gleams through the burnished abundance of her hair; of noting the grace and dignity of her pose, and speculating as to the nature of her thoughts. His wife's reckless impulse on that fateful September day was bringing him now within measurable distance of a very human danger. The deep, passionate heart of him, crushed and stifled during the past five years, was in no safe state to be brought into contact with a lighted match. But of this danger he was, by his very nature, sublimely unaware.

Finally he took the short pipe from his lips and spoke.

"Of course you know I have something definite to say, or I should hardly have the cheek to inflict myself on you twice in the twenty-four hours."

She looked up and smiled. "You're evidently in one of your bad moods, or you would not vex me by putting it like that."

"Sorry to vex you, but I am in a bad mood; have been for the last week; so you must make allowances, I can't sleep, and a restless devil inside me won't let me settle to steady work. Nerves, I suppose. I don't look a likely subject, do I? But they give me a deal of trouble at times; and I came to say that I must go back on my arrangement with you and Desmond and clear out of this before the end of the week."

"Oh, but surely that would be a great pity; a great disappointment to us both. Is it really a case of 'must'?"

"I think so."

"And you have only been here a fortnight! Isn't it rather early days to give in?"

"Very early days—as the case must appear to you; and the evil of it is that I have no power to make things clearer. Think me an overwrought fool; a broken-backed corn-stalk, if you choose. It will hurt, of course; but it can't be helped."

He spoke with undisguised bitterness, and, laying down her work, she looked at him straightly, a great compassion in her eyes.

"You misunderstand the fundamentals of friendship if you can talk like that," she said gently. "It is rooted in reticence in respect for another's individuality. Whatever you choose to do, you may be very sure that I shall neither doubt your good reasons, nor seek to know them. That is my idea of what it means to be a friend."

"I stand rebuked," he answered gravely, "and I'm not likely to forget what you have said."

"At the same time," she added in a lighter tone, "one is only human! And I can't let you leave Dalhousie without a word of protest—even if it is useless." She hesitated. "May I speak straight?"

"As straight as you please. I should prefer it."

"Well, I think that if it is a case of nerves, or—worry of any kind, nothing can be worse for you than your own society. Such amusement as we can offer you up here may be frivolous and insignificant enough, but, believe me, it is far better for you just now than the most sublime snowfields and glaciers at the back of Beyond! You know you are free to come here whenever you please. Theo enjoys having you; so do I. And I'm sure it's good for you to fraternise with something more human than a mountain!"

He smiled, but did not answer at once; and suddenly she lifted her head, her face all animation.

"Look here, I have a notion—an inspired notion. Why should not you two get Colonel Mayhew's permission to go off on a week's shooting trip beyond Chumba. Ten days if you like. Theo would love it. You would come back to your writing like a giant refreshed. There now, isn't that a plan worth thinking over?"

Moved beyond his wont, Lenox leaned impulsively towards her.

"My dear Mrs Desmond, your kindness overpowers me. But I really can't see that you and your husband are called upon to put yourselves out like that, on my behalf. You are up here to enjoy your short holiday together; and you are rare good companions, as I know. What right have I to monopolise him for ten days, and leave you alone? Why should you care, after all, if I do go and knock myself to bits in the interior?"

"That question is unworthy of you, and doesn't deserve an answer," she said on a note of gentle reproof. "Mine does. Will you do what I ask?"

"Since you ask it of me—yes. Always supposing that it suits Desmond to go."

"Of course it will suit him. We will settle it when he comes in."

He leaned back in his chair, and sighed.

"You're amazingly good to me, Mrs Desmond; and I'm an ungrateful brute. Will you overlook that, and play me something warranted to soothe jarred nerves, till your husband comes?"

"Of course I will, gladly. Only you mustn't expect real music from a hireling!"

She chose one of Beethoven's most tenderly gracious Allegrettos, and the soul of the hireling responded creditably to the magic of her touch.

But before she had played many bars a clatter of hoofs announced Desmond's return. He flung himself from the saddle, cleared the verandah steps at a bound, and entered the room:—a man of magnetic vitality, with a temperament like a clear flame; a typical officer of that isolated force to whose gallantry and unwearied devotion to duty India owes more than she is apt to acknowledge, or, possibly, to perceive. He nodded a welcome to Lenox, signed to him to remain seated, and going straight to the piano laid a hand on his wife's shoulder.

"Don't stop. Finish your piece," he said, as she smiled up at him; and he did not remove his hand, but remained standing there, in simple satisfaction at having got back to her.

Now and again, at very rare intervals, Nature seems to select a favoured man and woman to uphold the torch of the ideal, lest it be reduced to sparks and smoke, to refute the cynic and the pessimist; to hearten a world nauseated and discouraged by the eternal tragi-comedy of marriage, with the spectacle of a human relationship of unsullied beauty: a relationship that passes, by imperceptible degrees, from the first antiphony of passionate hearts to a deep deliberate bliss, "durable from the daily dust of life."

Desmond's first marriage had brought him no such revelation of the hidden mysteries of union; no companionship worthy of the name; and the happiness that comes late, on the heels of conflict and pain, takes a more conscious grip on the heart, is more firmly held to, more jealously guarded, than that which meets us on the threshold, and is accepted as part of the natural order of things. Blest with vivacity, courage, and an ardent zest for Frontier soldiering, Desmond had rarely found life other than very good; but he had only proven the full measure of its goodness since his marriage with Honor Meredith. And the mouths brought increasing reliance on her comradeship; increasing insight into the depths and delicacies of a passion that was almost genius. His need of her was deeper now than it had been two years ago, when he had believed himself at the summit of desire. For a great love is like a great mountain-range. Each height scaled reveals farther heights beyond. Attainment is no part of our programme here; and there may well be truth in the axiom that "to travel hopefully is better than to arrive."

But Eldred Lenox, tangled in the twofold cords of temperament and circumstance, was denied even the privilege of travelling hopefully, and at moments like the present he suffered the additional torment of looking into happiness through another man's eyes. It was futile to reiterate the obvious drawbacks of marriage for an ambitious man, standing on the threshold of a coveted career. These distracting Desmonds cheerfully and unconsciously refuted them all! But he accepted the thorns of the situation as toll paid for the privilege of an intimacy he would on no account have forgone, and endured them with the grim stoicism that was his.

The Allegretto ended, Honour swung round on her stool, and set forth her Chumba project without reference to Eldred's threatened departure. Desmond laughingly professed himself ready to obey orders, within reasonable limits; and it was finally decided that he should write at once to Colonel Mayhew, Resident of the native State in which Dalhousie's hills are situated, and whose capital lies in a cup-shaped valley eighteen miles below the English station.

Thereupon Lenox rose to take his leave; but on the threshold he paused, as though an afterthought had occurred to him.

"Next time you happen to go out calling, Mrs Desmond," he said, with studied carelessness, "you might like to look up a Miss Maurice and her brother. They've been here all the winter; and are living on the top of Bakrotas. I met them—some years ago, in Switzerland. Artists, out here for painting purposes—and rather out of the common run. You might find them interesting."

"They sound as if they would be! Thank you for letting me know of their existence. I'll amuse myself by exploiting them while you two are away."

But Lenox had no wish to expatiate upon the subject, and with a muttered disclaimer he was gone.



CHAPTER VI.

"I will but say what mere friends say— Or only a thought stronger. I will hold your hand as long as all may— Or—no very little longer." —Browning.

"No, I don't like her, and I don't believe I ever shall. One cannot deny that she is beautiful, charming, complete; too complete for my taste. Cela me gene. I know no other way to express it."

Quita Maurice balanced herself on the railing of her matchbox verandah, and gazed critically at the corner where the last of Honor Desmond's jhampannis had not long since disappeared from view. Garth, the inevitable, stood close beside her, faultlessly equipped as always, even to the gold-tipped cigarette, and the violets that blossomed perennially in his coat. He grew them in pots expressly for the purpose; and his bearer set them in a wine-glass on his breakfast-table every morning.

Quita's verdict on her visitor moved him to a smile of half-cynical amusement. He enjoyed her occasional unabashed lapses into the eternal feminine.

"I'm with you there," he answered, heartily. "The worst fault a human being can commit is to be faultless. Poor Mrs Desmond! She will have to subsist without our admiration."

"No need to waste pity on her, mon ami. I am convinced that she gets far more admiration than is good for her as it is. She has only been married a little over two years, I believe, and it is safe to presume that her husband idolises her shadow. She is the sort of woman men put on a pedestal, and worship kneeling; and women mostly detest, because, in their secret hearts, they would like to be up there too! Personally I have no use for pedestals. I am content to be bon camarade! As for that sublime Desmond woman, I feel morally certain that she never commits an indiscretion, or has a knot in her shoe-lace, or loses her scissors!"

"Are you peculiarly lenient towards those three failings?"

"I am quite culpably lenient towards the whole tribe of human failings. They are the salt of life. I have never really understood that incessant harping on the mystery of pain and sin. The question, Why should they be allowed to exist? seems to me simply fatuous. No world worth living in could have been created without them. They are the backbone of all drama; and I love drama inordinately. They put the iron into men's souls, and the grit into their characters. Think what a nauseating crew of sentimentalists we should be,

'If all had love, as every nest hath eggs, And every head of maize her feathery cap.'

I, for one, should beg to be excused from spending three-score years and ten on a planet full of sugar-plums and kisses!"

She left her perch on the railings, and stood erect, in an unconscious attitude of defiance; and Garth watched her speculatively through narrowed lids. He was wondering whether Mrs Desmond's remark that she had persuaded Captain Lenox to go shooting beyond Chumba, instead of deserting Dalhousie for the interior, might not be accountable for this unusual burst of eloquence.

"I had no notion that you went in for studying big questions of that kind," he remarked, with an amused air of interest.

"Studying them! But no! What call is there to study them? I have my ears and eyes, and my priceless intuitions. It is enough. An artist will learn more about life and character with the help of those three, than all the savants in creation could imbibe from a hecatomb of books. Michel—where are you? What has been keeping you so quiet since Mrs Desmond's departure?"

Michael, who promptly appeared on the threshold, held up a large drawing-block for his sister's inspection.

"Voila donc! Que dis-tu? Is it not to the life?"

The picture was a rapid, delicate pastel study of Honor Desmond, presenting her, as Michael had said, "to the life." The broad brow, the short straight nose, the strength and tenderness of the mouth and chin, the smile that hovered like a light in her serious eyes; every detail was faultlessly rendered. But Quita's cry of surprise expressed annoyance rather than admiration.

"What possessed you to do that?" she asked, sharply. "It is a living likeness—yes. Better send it to her friend, Captain Lenox. He would give you a hundred and fifty rupees for it like a shot."

The instant the words were out she tingled with mortification at having spoken them in Garth's presence. But he assumed a critical interest in the picture, and Michael, in the first flush of achievement, had eyes and thoughts for nothing else.

"A hundred and fifty? Parbleu, non!" he answered, hotly. "It is a possession, a triumph. I do not part with it for money. All the while she talked to you, I never took my eyes from her face, and I struck while the iron was hot. Mon Dieu, mais die est superbe! C'est une deesse veritable! Rien non plus!"

In ecstatic moments Michael deserted English altogether for the natural language of the emotions; and Quita flashed a glance of amusement at Garth.

"The pedestal already, you see!"

But Michael, deaf or unheeding, continued his paean of praise.

"But the head alone is not enough. Il faut le tout ensemble. Ca sera magnifique. Now at last I have the centre figure for my great picture—Mater Triumphans. In a day or two I call on her. I ask her permission to immortalise her and myself in one achievement. No woman in her senses could refuse so flattering a request; and her lips, her eyes, betray that, goddess or not, she is before all things a woman."

"But, my good Michel," Quita interposed, with a deliberate lightness, "ride your enthusiasm on the curb, I beg of you. Isn't one goddess at a time enough to fill your expansive heart? I warn you that if you are going to disgrace me by ostentatiously falling in love with this Mrs Desmond, I shall give you up for good, and insist on a legal separation! Now, I am tired of idling, and it's high time I went back to my picture." She held out a hand to Garth. "A demain," she said, with a gracious smile of dismissal. "But not till tea-time, please. I have a certain amount of work to get through every day if you have not!"

Garth's reply was conveyed to a lingering pressure of her hand. He was a past master in this discreet method of expressing the inexpressible; and he had the satisfaction of seeing the colour deepen in her cheeks, as she released herself hastily, and passed on into the house.

During a long ride homeward, Garth found time for much interested speculation on the possible issue of events. The situation appeared sufficiently incomprehensible to afford scope for dramatic developments; and he shared to the full Quita's taste for drama, provided always that it did not deprive him of sleep, or render him personally uncomfortable. He shared also her magnanimous attitude towards human shortcomings; frankly acknowledging his own, and skilfully utilising those of other men—and women. But bad men are as often tripped up by the unquenchable spark of good in human nature as good men are by the equally unquenchable spark of evil; and James Garth was not altogether devoid of the little leaven that leavens the whole lump. There were even moments—and the present was one—when it asserted itself to the detriment of his cool-headed schemes. Generally speaking, a husband in the background in no way disturbed his accommodating code of morals. But scruples, hitherto unknown, seemed set like a hedge of defence about this girl, who was, in every respect, so very much a woman.

For all her love of dangerous ground, her airy scorn of conventions, she had a knack of compelling some measure of uprightness, even from so unpromising a subject as James Garth. Thus, bone-bred gossip though he was, his silence in respect of her astounding revelation was assured. Her words, "I trust you, as a gentleman," had quickened that good grain in him, which is the saving grace of us all. Also the knowledge itself hurt him more than he could have believed. It seriously upset his equanimity for no less than a week; not indeed to the extent of damaging his appetite, or his sleep, but enough to make her society a distraction more bitter than sweet; enough to drive him into dining at the Strawberry Bank Hotel, though the cuisine of that mixed establishment compared very unfavourably with his own.

Here he naturally met Lenox, and the meeting reawakened his consuming curiosity; awakened also those primitive savage instincts which no surface civilisation will ever annihilate while the world holds one woman and two men. And how should it be accounted theft to rob a man of that which, to all appearance, he neither possessed nor desired to recapture?

In twenty years of philandering he had never experienced so keen a desire for conquest; and if this inexplicable husband chose to leave his wife in an equivocal position, he must be prepared to accept the consequences, which are, in general, the last things that any average man is prepared to accept. Shrewdness and vanity alike convinced Garth that Quita's attitude on Dynkund, viewed in the light of her subsequent disclosure, counted for nothing; while the fact that for six months she had readily accepted his companionship counted for much. Her fine sense of honour had naturally compelled her to "head him off" dangerous ground. But he consoled himself with the reflection that a woman's sense of honour is rarely her strongest point. Pit her heart against it, and the outcome is merely a question of time. A conviction founded on his own complicated past!

In his esteem, then, nothing stood between him and his desire but a poor crop of scruples, readily trampled under foot; and by a fine stroke of irony Lenox himself completed the trampling process. He, who rarely took an active part in the random, unedifying talk congenial to after-dinner "pegs" and cigars, had one night been moved to administer advice to a rapturous subaltern, in the shape of a few trenchant cynicisms in respect of women and marriage, bidding him not be fool enough to run his misguided head into the noose; and the subaltern had collapsed like a pricked air-ball. But Garth, to his own surprise, retorted with no little warmth; and Lenox, turning in his chair, looked at him deliberately—a glint of steel in his eyes.

"I couldn't presume to cross swords with you, Major," he remarked, on a quiet note of contempt. "Your experience is as extensive as my own is limited; and you have the good luck to be popular. I have not. But that is simply a question of metier. Yours is to flatter women, even behind their backs; whilst I am blockhead enough to speak the truth about them, even to their faces. And the last thing a normal woman wants from any man is—the truth."

From that moment Garth had hardened his heart. And now—a week later—as he rode down from the Crow's Nest, he chuckled to himself over the satisfactory way in which Lenox was playing into his hands by adopting an attitude that would plainly act as a foil to his own deferentially persistent courtship; a metaphorical walking round the walls of Jericho, that must end in capitulation, soon or late.

From his point of view, Quita's unique position of personal freedom, coupled with legal bondage, added a distinct flavour to the whole affair: and so well pleased was he with the aspect of things in general, that, before reaching Potrain, he headed his pony up another corkscrew path, that climbed to another doll's house bungalow. Here he spent a couple of hours, lounging in the drawing-room of one of the lesser lights in his firmament, flattering her by a delicately conveyed impression that he found her the only woman in the station worth talking to. And so, home to his own well-appointed house, where, two hours after an irreproachable dinner, he slept the sleep of the man whose conscience has been trained not to make inconvenient remarks.



CHAPTER VII.

"God uses us to help each other so, Lending our lives out." —Browning.

Before May was out Honor met her unpromising acquaintance several times, by chance. But nothing beyond formal greetings passed between them. Twice she happened to be riding alone with Lenox; the third time, her husband was with them: and on every occasion Quita's companion was James Garth,—the only one among them all who enjoyed the situation. Quita herself found a perverse satisfaction, unworthy of her best moments, in thus emphasising her indifference to her husband's presence; ignoring, with characteristic heedlessness, the fact that a two-edged weapon is an ill thing to handle: and Lenox, accepting her unspoken intimation au pied de la lettre, steeled himself to half-cynical, half-stoical endurance.

He had returned heartened, and fortified by a week of stirring sport, and by closer contact with a personality wholesome and invigorating as a hill wind; a sympathy of the practical order, that found expression in matter-of-fact service and good fellowship, rather than in speech. He had given up all thought of leaving the station; had decided to set his teeth, and go through with his ordeal, sooner than disappoint these new-found friends, who seemed already to have become a part of his life. Such rapid intimacies are a distinctive feature of a country where a guest may come for a night, and stay for a month; where all white men are brothers, in the widest sense of the word.

And Eldred Lenox did not hold with half measures. Since he stood his ground in order to please the Desmonds, he held himself ready to fall in with any joint plans they might choose to make. Thus, he agreed to share in their arrangements for the June camp, at Kajiar,—a natural glade hid in the heart of Kalatope Forest: and even accepted, without demur, Colonel Mayhew's proposal to preface the 'week' with a two days' house-party at the Chumba Residency;—a picturesque house, whose garden of lawns, and roses, and English trees falls sheer to the eddying river below. The two sportsmen had spent a couple of days here on their way back, the Resident being down in Chumba on State business; and his suggestion had been the natural outcome of Desmond's keen interest in the book which was his hobby of the moment.

"I must be down here then," he explained, "for the Minjla Mela, a superstitious ceremony by which we test the luck of the State for the coming year. An unfortunate buffalo is flung into the Ravee, just above the rapids; and if he succumbs, or scrambles out on the far side, the gods will not fail us. But if he lands on the town bank, they won't trouble their heads about us till next June. Naturally we do our best to prevent such a catastrophe, in spite of our conviction that the matter is settled by the will of the gods! As far as I know, the ceremony is peculiar to Chumba; and this would be a good chance for you to see it, if you don't mind a trifle of heat, and if your wife would care to come too, so much the better."

"She'll come like a shot, thanks," Desmond answered heartily.

"Good!—We'll get up a native dinner at the Palace in honour of the occasion. My little girl has set her heart on the plan, rather to my wife's dismay. The Maurices want to come too; and we may have to include Garth, on her account; though I confess I wanted her for myself! She's worth talking to, that girl. There's a touch of genius in her composition, and a touch of the folly that's apt to go along with it; or she would never give the gossips a chance to couple her name with Garth's. If he is in earnest, so much the worse for her.—We may count on you, Lenox, I hope?" he added, turning to the impassive man at his side, whom he had unwittingly smitten between the joints of his harness.

Lenox's muttered assent was a trifle indistinct, owing to the thick pipe-stem between his teeth, and rising deliberately, he passed out of the smoking-room into the wistaria-shadowed verandah, where the turbulent voice of the river seemed to echo his own mood. It was well for himself, and for James Garth also, that he ran no risk of meeting the man at that moment.

The thought of that first fortnight in June unnerved him. For Colonel Mayhew's words had done more than turn the knife in an open wound. Lenox was blest, or curst, with that most pitiless of mentors, a Scotch conscience. Whatever Quita's failings, or her attitude to himself, there could be no shelving the fact that he was her husband:—the guardian of her good name, the one man on earth who could claim the right to criticise her conduct. Her probable repudiation both of his criticism, and his right to offer it, did not, in his view, justify him in standing aloof, if need for speech should arise. Possibly passion, smouldering at the heart of duty, urged him towards the desperate experiment. But if so, he would not admit it, even to himself. He merely decided—with an access of fastidious disgust at the whole situation—to accept this fate-sent opportunity for judging how far her behaviour warranted Colonel Mayhew's kindly concern. For he knew enough of Garth and his methods to feel certain that, in his case, to covet an invitation was to procure it.

After all, he reflected bitterly, a closer acquaintance with facts might cure him of an infatuation against which pride and inherited instinct had rebelled ill vain: and so intricate are the mazes of self-deception, that he firmly believed in his own desire to be cured.

It was, no doubt, solely in pursuance of this purpose that, a few days later, he added his initials, with a wry face of resignation, to a subscription list, proposing that the bachelors of the station should give a ball on the third of June. He had not seen the inside of a ballroom for years: but since the season seemed marked for strange experiences, this one might as well be included with the rest. And in the meantime, this inconsistent misogynist slept little, smoked inordinately, and spent the greater part of his leisure at Terah Cottage. Perhaps this also was part of the cure!

Desmond noted the fact, not without an occasional spark of annoyance. For all his magnanimity, the man was masculine to the core; hot-blooded, and still very much a lover at heart. But pride and a boundless trust in the woman he had won had withheld him as yet from serious comment.

Lenox dined with them on the night of the dance; and came armed with programmes, at Honor's request.

"Are you going to give me my share before we start?" he asked, as they shook hands.

"If I do, will you try to dance?"

He laughed abruptly. "Not I. It would be a sight to make angels weep! I shall take you right away from the whole thing, and talk to you—that's all. Is that good enough?"

"Quite good enough!"

He scanned an open programme with perplexed interest, as though it were an Egyptian hieroglyph.

"How long do each of these things last?" he asked, with evident amusement.

"About twelve minutes, with the pause."

"What's the good of twelve minutes? Can't I have them in batches, three at a time. Or would that be going quite out of bounds?"

Honor laughed. . . . "I'm afraid so! Though it would be far nicer. But I will give you one 'batch,' and two isolated ones; and that's a generous allowance, I assure you."

"Thanks.—I suppose Desmond takes you in to supper?"

"Yes. It's a standing engagement! Why don't you ask Miss Maurice?" There was a moment of silence.

"We are not intimate enough for that," he answered, with a bad imitation of unconcern; and Honor wondered, as she had done before now, wherein lay the key to a curiosity-provoking situation. But just then Desmond joined them; and no more was said.

The moment they entered the ballroom Lenox was aware of his wife,—the focal point in a circle of men, distributing her favours with a smiling impartiality that was, in itself, a delicate form of coquetry, while Garth stood sentinel beside her, with an unmistakable suggestion of 'No Thoroughfare,' which he could assume to a nicety; and which Lenox noted with a curse at the restrictions imposed upon civilised man.

But a second glance at Quita crowded all else out of his mind. It was his first sight of her in full evening dress, and he stood spellbound by the radiant quality of her charm: a charm that triumphed over minor imperfections of feature and form; a mental and spiritual vitality that had deepened rather than diminished with the years. Her dress, like everything about her, was an instinctive expression of herself: though Lenox, while appreciating its harmony, could not have defined it in set terms. He knew that it was of velvet; that it sheathed her rounded slenderness as a rind sheathes its fruit; that the light and shade on its surface, as she moved, reminded him of willows in a wind; that, from shoulder to hem, the eye was nowhere checked, the simplicity of outline nowhere marred by objectless incidents of adornment. He noted also that its indefinite colour was repeated in a row of aquamarines, that glistened like drops of sea-water at her throat.

A light touch on his arm recalled him to outward things.

"Captain Lenox, where are your manners?" Honor Desmond remonstrated, with laughter in her eyes. "The Mayhews have just gone past, and you looked straight through them! Is that the way you welcome your guests?"

He muttered an incoherent apology, and fervently hoped that she had not observed the direction of his gaze. A vain hope, seeing that she was a woman!

"Better get safe into the card-room before I do anything worse!" he added uneasily. "I'll be back for number five. Trust me not to forget."

As he crossed the barn of a room,—lavishly draped with bazaar bunting, and starred with radiating bayonets,—his eyes lighted on Kenneth Malcolm, the Engineer subaltern, whose current of courtship had been checked by Maurice's arrival on the scene:—a boy of stalwart build; his straight features and well-poised head justifying the sobriquet of Apollo, bestowed upon him by an effusive admirer, whose sole reward had been a cordial detestation. He leaned against the wall, absently twirling the cord of his programme; his attention centred on a corner of the room, where Elsie Mayhew—an incarnate moonbeam of a girl—was critically examining the pattern on her fan, while Maurice possessed himself of her programme, and sprinkled it liberally with the letter M. In the boy's bottled-up resentment Lenox saw a reflection of his own; and the fact moved him to scorn rather than sympathy.

"Damned idiots, both of us!" he reflected savagely. "A couple of dogs whose bones have been confiscated, and we haven't even the pluck to snarl."

The opening valse struck up as he reached the cardroom. Without looking directly at his wife, he saw Garth's arm encircle her waist, saw him hold her thus, for an appreciable moment, before starting; and sat down to the whist table with murder in his heart.

At number five he re-entered the ballroom to claim Honor Desmond for his 'batch' of dances, and to take her, as he had said, right away from it all. She found him little inclined for talk; yet none the less quick to appreciate her understanding of his mood.

"Thank you for bearing with me," he said, as they parted in one of the many doorways opening on to the long verandah. "I won't come in. I am in the humour for the profound philosophies of tobacco and the stars."

"Better companions than a mere woman!" she answered, smiling into the gravity of his eyes. "Don't deny it. I have no taste for lip service."

"Nor I the smallest gift for it. Still, truth is truth; and a good deal depends on the quality of—the mere woman."

She vouchsafed him the stateliest shadow of a curtsey.

"I believe I shall end in converting you, after all! Number twelve. Don't forget."

And turning from him she saw that her husband stood a few paces off, watching them with a thoughtful scrutiny that caught at her heart. Gliding across the polished floor, she slipped a hand under his elbow, and leaned close to him.

"Darling," she whispered, "I am so glad this is ours." Without a word, he put his arm round her, and swept her into the crowd.

For a while Lenox followed them with his eyes, as they circled smoothly in and out among the dancers, as notable a couple as the room contained. Then he raked the shifting crowd for Quita's grey-green figure,—in vain. Neither she nor Garth was to be seen. It needed small perspicacity to locate them: and grinding his teeth Lenox went out again into a night jewelled with the unnumbered bonfires of the universe. Striking a match, he lit his pipe, in defiance of the knowledge that for the past few weeks he had been persistently overstepping his self-imposed allowance, and fell to pacing the railed path outside the building.

Was it altogether his own fault, he wondered bitterly, that he stood thus, cut off from the core of life, breaking his teeth upon the husks of it, and making believe that they satisfied his hunger? In the tragedies resulting from 'the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things,' that question flung, again and again into the 'derisive silence of eternity,' mocks the soul with echo's answer. Where lies the blame? Where, indeed? For all his vaunted supremacy man is not always master of his fate. Circumstance, heredity, the despicable trifle, the inexpert finger, which a certain type of human is so zealous to thrust into an alien life, compass him about with a cloud of witnesses to his own impotence.

With which conclusion, softened by the kindly influence of drugged tobacco, Lenox knocked the ashes out of his pipe; and decided that since he was here to observe his wife and Garth, and to cure himself of an undignified infatuation, it would be well to return to the ballroom till number twelve.

But as he moved forward a low laugh, near at hand, chained him to the spot. Then Quita emerged from a patch of shadow, closely followed by Garth. She tilted her chin, and flung a smiling threat at him over her shoulder.

"If you can't be more reasonable, I shall cancel your remaining dances and give them to the Riley boy." Which announcement brought him swiftly to her side; and Lenox failed to catch his murmured reply. They passed on without perceiving him; and he followed . . . merely from a sense of duty!

At one of the open doorways, that flung panels of light across the verandah, they paused; and he paused also, a few paces off. The couples within were forming themselves into ordered squares.

"Lancers," she said, in a tone of distaste.

"Are you dancing them?" he asked.

"No."

"Come and sit out again, then; and I'll be as reasonable as you please."

She glanced quickly round the room, as if in search of something.

"Very well," she said: and turning on the threshold, came face to face with her husband.

With a scarcely perceptible start, she acknowledged his grave bow of recognition, and drew back to let him pass. But he remained close enough to catch what followed.

"I'd rather dance than sit out, after all," she announced, with a brisk change of manner.

"But, dear lady, . . . why?"

She laughed. "What a question! I thought you pretended to know something about women? I claim the divine right of whim. Voila, tout! One can't spend the evening in explanation. The spirit moves me to romp. It's infinitely more wholesome than mooning under the stars. All we want now is a cheery vis-a-vis. Ah . . . there's Michel. The very man!"

She signalled across the room with her fan, and Michael came skidding and slithering towards her, a delighted girl clinging to his arm:—a girl in the glamour of her first season, a-thrill to her white kid finger-tips because these rested on the sleeve of a living artist, who had already paid her one or two chivalry-coated compliments.

"Now why the deuce did she weather-cock round like that?" Lenox wondered, floundering in the quicksands of masculine ignorance.

But no answer suggested itself; because this woman, who was his, and yet not his,—this woman, with her many-hued personality, rich in subtle contradictions—was a sealed book to him, and seemed like to remain so. And what, after all, are the hearts that beat closest to our own but sealed books, which we open from time to time, at random; too often at the wrong page? But a ballroom is no fit place for abstract meditation. The lust of eye and ear, the pride of life, challenge the sense at every turn, till mere thought seems a mighty bloodless affair.

Lenox moved back to the doorway, leaned against the woodwork, and folding his arms, surveyed the scene before him with the apathetic interest of the large and mystified. The long room was crowded with jumbled atoms of colour, like a damaged kaleidoscope; with talk and laughter; with the whisper of sweeping skirts, and the clink of spurs. Then the first provocative bars set every foot in motion; and the kaleidoscope effect was complete.

Lenox,—towering isolated, amid a world of light-hearted couples,—was aware that beneath his surface indifference there lurked a certain shamefaced envy of these bewildering mortals who could shuffle off the years, and revert, unabashed, to the entrancing follies of childhood; and who could yet, in lucid intervals, grapple undismayed with intricacies of Indian legislation, lead a forlorn hope, love and suffer and die, if need be, with a stiff lip, and an obstinate faith in 'the ultimate decency of things.' For of a truth, the earth holds no more fantastic farrago of folly and heroism than your average human being; and musing on these things, Lenox decided that there must have been some radical flaw in his own education.

Not twenty feet away, the General himself—the host-in-chief of the evening—condemned, despite increasing years and girth, to the Eton jacket of boyhood, pranced and glided with elaborate precision, and took every opportunity of twirling plump little Mrs Mayhew almost off her feet. Both laughed inordinately at each repetition of the mild joke: and if the C.B. blazing on the General's mess-jacket, and the little lady's full-grown daughter contrasted oddly with their passing display of childishness, both were serenely blind to the fact.

But among a hundred dancers, not one plunged more whole-heartedly into the folly of the moment than Quita. She had stationed herself opposite the door where Lenox stood, and the very spirit of devilry seemed to have entered into her, driving her to italicise every trait in herself that must needs grate on his fastidiousness where a woman's conduct was concerned. Her effervescent gaiety dominated the 'set,' which speedily degenerated into a romp till, in the third figure, an incident occurred which partially brought her to her senses.

The room reeled and hummed with spinning circles, like living Katherine-wheels, when Quita,—losing her precarious hold upon her partner's coat-sleeve, and flying outward, by a natural impetus that must have sent her crashing against the woodwork of the door,—found herself caught, and steadied by her husband's hands at her waist. For a lightning instant he held her thus—breathless and throbbing, like a bird prisoned in his grasp: then he straightened himself, and let fall his empty hands.

"I am sorry," he muttered, barely looking at her. "But I was afraid you might hurt yourself."

"Thank you. It was very stupid of me."

She left him hurriedly, red-hot vexation tingling in her cheeks: and when next the Katherine-wheels spun about, she remained stationary, smiling and waving her hand in answer to repeated invitations to "come on."

Lenox remained stationary also, though the whole scene had suddenly become hateful to him: for that moment of contact, and the rush of colour to his wife's face, had roused him to the need for immediate action. Thus, when a final mad galop scattered the coherent atoms of the kaleidoscope, he intercepted Quita and her partner, as they hurried out to secure a favourite nook.

But the polite formula of the ballroom did not spring readily to his lips.

"Have you a spare dance to give me?" he asked bluntly. "Since you evidently don't object to sitting out."

His tone had in it more of demand than of request, an effect heightened by his deliberate omission of her name; and against his will annoyance lurked in the last words. But some men have a positive talent for standing in their own light.

For a second or two her eyes challenged his in mute amazement. Each seemed trying to read the other's thought. But pride darkens insight: and at the critical moment a slight movement of the arm she held reminded her of Garth's glimpse behind the scenes. She pulled herself together, and made an obvious feint of consulting her programme.

"If you really wanted one, you should have spoken earlier," she rebuked him lightly. "I'm afraid I haven't so much as half an extra to offer you now."

He accepted his dismissal with a curt bow of acknowledgment.

"Thought I wanted to make love to her, no doubt," he reflected savagely, as he moved away. And she passed on into the verandah, wondering . . . wondering why he had wanted that dance, and whether she would have thrown some one over for him, but for Garth's opportune reminder at her elbow.

On the opening of the next dance, Lenox sought and found Honor Desmond, silently offered his arm, and led her through the verandah out into the starshine,—which is a reality in India, on moonless nights.

"What a thundering relief it is to get away from it all!" he said at length. "Would it bother you to stroll a little way up the hill? We shall be crowded out here, in no time; and I must have another pipe."

"Let's stroll then, by all means. I should enjoy it; and you know how I love tobacco. I saw you looking on at that dance; and I rather envied you. I often wish I could set aside a few dances just for looking on, without having to make talk for any one. People interest me so passionately; always have done, since I can remember."

"Even Button Quails, and black-hearted woman-haters?"

"Yes. Especially the woman-haters; because they need converting!"

"And are unconvertible," Lenox declared with a laugh. "But don't you ever get sickened with the deadly sameness of the whole tribe of us,—grinding ourselves to dust in the eternal treadmill of hatred and love, hope and despair? Every conceivable human complication has been repeated ad nauseam since Adam made a fool of himself in the garden of Eden."

"And through all that endless sameness, no two men and women have ever behaved twice alike! That's where the interest comes in, don't you see? To-night, for instance, Miss Maurice and that pretty child Elsie Mayhew are both wasting their sweetness on men quite unworthy of them; but each is doing the same thing in a fashion so entirely her own, that it is not like looking on at the same play at all. I am specially concerned over the Mayhew muddle, for I believe that handsome Engineer boy is capable of breaking his heart in earnest because Elsie has lost hers pro tem.,—engaging little goose that she is. Really I sometimes think that the man and woman puzzle is just an endless game of cross questions and crooked answers!"

Lenox laughed again, harshly.

"That's a straight shot!" he said. "It's a mad world; and the maddest creature in it is the man who stakes his happiness on the state of a woman's heart."

Honor slipped her hand from his arm.

"Really, Captain Lenox," she protested, half-laughing, half in earnest, "that remark almost amounts to an insult! What do you suppose Theo would say if he heard you?"

"Wouldn't stop to pick his language," Lenox answered with a twisted smile. "But his testimony counts for nothing. He has found the one woman among a thousand, that even Solomon failed to find; and the Lord knows he didn't judge them from hearsay!"

The sincerity underlying his bluntness brought the blood to Honor's cheeks. "Theo has simply found—a woman who loves him," she answered softly. "A discovery most men can make if they choose; even rank heretics like you! Will you forgive me, I wonder, if I say that I believe the thing you really need, though you may not guess it, is . . . a woman in your life?"

Lenox did not answer: and they walked on for a time in silence.

"Have I vexed you?" Honor asked at length.

"No. You touched an exposed nerve. That was all. And I should like you to know the truth now; or at least part of it.—Five years ago I did take . . . a woman into my life, as you put it; and I have never known real peace or comfort since."

Honor started, and turned upon him a face of incredulity.

"Captain Lenox! Do you mean—have you actually—been married?"

"I actually am married, in the eyes of the law, at least. What's more, my wife is here, in Dalhousie, in that cursed ballroom,—with neither my name nor my ring to protect her—playing the fool for the amusement or perdition of another chap. You spoke of her a minute ago. I need hardly say more, need I?"

"No, no. I understand it all now," she murmured, deeply moved. "Then that was why you wanted to go away last month?"

"Yes."

"And I stupidly made things harder, in my blind zeal to help you?"

"No, indeed. You simply convinced me, without suspecting it, that it would be cowardly to bolt at sight. Besides, it would have amounted to an open confession that—one cared."

"And don't you—care?"

Lenox clenched his teeth upon an inarticulate sound; and his amber mouthpiece snapped like a stick of sealing-wax. He took the pipe from his mouth; eyed it ruefully, and slipped it into his breast-pocket.

"A good friend gone," he muttered. "And all on account of a woman who doesn't care a snap of the fingers whether one is alive or dead."

"In my opinion that remains to be proved."

"Does it? Isn't her conduct with that confounded ladykiller proof enough to convince you?"

"No."

"Well, then, look here. Ten minutes ago I went so far as to ask her for a dance. She gave me the snub direct: and she'll not get a chance to refuse another request of mine—that's certain."

Honor's lips lifted at the corners.

"I wonder what tone of voice you asked her in?" was all she said.

"Quite the wrong one, no doubt. I was in no humour for going on my knees. But she knew right enough that I wouldn't have risked refusal, unless I was very keen on the dance."

"All the same, you will give her another chance. You must. No act of folly on her part can make it right for you to leave her in such a false position."

"The position was her own choice,—not mine."

"One could guess as much. Yet the fact remains that she is—yours, to make or mar: and it seems to me no less than your duty to pocket your pride, and save her from her own foolishness in spite of herself."

Lenox drew an audible breath, like a man in pain.

"You do know how to hit between the eyes," he said very low. "But—I have suffered enough at her hands."

"And has she suffered nothing—at yours?"

Honor's voice was scarcely louder than his own, and her pulses throbbed at her own daring. Lenox stood stock-still, and looked at her.

"Upon . . my . . soul," he said slowly, "you are a stunning woman! I . . ."

"Please don't think I meant you to answer such a question," she broke in hurriedly, with flaming cheeks.

"Of course not. You meant it as a reminder that there are two sides to every question."

"Yes. How nice of you to understand! I have no shadow of right to take you to task. But when the fate of two lives seems hanging on a thread, one dare not keep silence.—Now, I think we ought to turn back. And I wonder if you would mind telling me a little about your wife," she added, with diplomatic intent to prolong his softened mood. "She is so charming; so individual. But I haven't been able to get at her at all. She seems almost to dislike me; and I am just beginning to guess why."

"Nonsense . . . nonsense," he protested brusquely. "You are entirely mistaken."

"That also remains to be proved!"

They retraced their steps down the rough path that descends from the Mall to the Assembly Rooms, walking very slowly, as people do when absorbed. Honor, with all a woman's skill, imparted a flavour of reminiscence to their talk; and no man with a spark of love in his heart can hold out, for long, against the magic suggestiveness of memory. For all his guarded indifference of manner, she felt the ice melting under her touch: and the passionate human interest, of which she had already spoken, held her, to exclusion of such minor trivialities as possibly distracted partners. For this woman, the human note,—be it never so untuneful—surpassed the sublimest music plucked from the heart of wood or wire.

Arrived on the gravel ledge outside the building, they paused in a shaft of light, still intent on their subject; till the inspiriting rhythm of a polka shattered the stillness, and Honor, turning hastily, caught sight of an erect figure in the doorway behind her.

"There's Theo. He seems to be looking for me," she said. "Why, we must have talked through two dances. Come."

But at the foot of the verandah steps Lenox held out his hand.

"The evening is ended for me. I am going straight home, to think over all you have said. I'll be round by ten to-morrow. Good-night—and thank you."

He italicised the last words by a vigorous hand-clasp; and a moment later she stood in the doorway, confronting her husband. A glance at his face put her laughing apology to flight.

"I tell you what it is, Honor," he broke out hotly, "you're going too far altogether. Here has Maurice been letting half Dalhousie know that he couldn't find you anywhere; and the last dance—was mine. Heaven knows where you buried yourselves. I didn't attempt to look. Lenox has no business to monopolise you in this way. Woman-hater, indeed!"

"It was not his fault," she flashed out, in an impulse more generous than wise: but her blood was as quick to take fire as his own.

"Then it was yours, which is fifty times worse."

Honor lifted her head with a superb dignity of gesture.

"As you please," she said quietly. "It is useless to attempt explanation here, or anywhere, till you are more . . like yourself."

Returning couples were by now besieging the doorway; and she passed on into the ballroom, her head still high, her lips compressed, lest others should note their tendency to quiver. A woman who loves the man of her choice with every fibre of her being does not readily forget, though she may forgive, his first rough words to her.

Honor was claimed at once by Kenneth Malcolm, a favourite partner, boy though he was. But the keen edge of her interest was blunted. She wanted one thing only to be alone with Theo; to set his mind at rest: and those 'separated selves,' who drew her like nothing else on earth, became of a sudden mere voluble obstructions between herself and her desire.

Half an hour later she came up to him, where he stood, laughing and talking in a group of men.

"I am tired, Theo," she said in a low tone. "Mr Maurice is getting my dandy for me. But don't come away if you'd rather stop on."

Their eyes locked for an instant.

"Is that likely?" he asked, a gleam in his own.

"I don't know."

"You do know. Look sharp and get your things on."

Michael Maurice did not hurry himself over the congenial task of settling his deesse veritable among the cushions of her dandy,—a hybrid conveyance, half canoe, half cane lounge, slung from the shoulders of four men, by an ingenious arrangement of straps and cross poles. Closer acquaintance had deepened his admiration: but a nameless something in her manner warned him that it must not be expressed in his usual promiscuous fashion. She had refused, very sweetly but decisively, the honour of appearing in his great picture. But Desmond had succumbed to the temptation of procuring a portrait of her and 'little Paul.' "At the worst, I can sell a pony to pay for it," he had said, in answer to her remonstrance. "And I shall think it cheap at the price!"

And now, as the dandy-bearers turned to mount the ascent, he came to his wife's side. She had drawn off her gloves, and one hand rested on the woodwork of her canoe. He covered it with his own, walking by her thus, for a few steps, in silence: and it was enough.

"Mount now," she commanded him softly. "And let's hurry home, I've ever so much to tell you."

He obeyed: and they journeyed upward to familiar music of hoof-beats, and the murmur of jhampannies, wrapt about by the magic of a night so still that all the winds seemed to have gone round with the sun to the other side of the world.

A tray set with glass and silver awaited them in the drawing-room.

Honor, entering first, slipped the long cloak from her shoulders with a satisfied sigh, a sense of passing from the unreal to the real, which she often experienced on returning from a dance: and underlying all, a profound pity for the lone and ill-mated women, in a world of oddments and misfits, who have never felt the thrill of such home-comings as this of hers to-night. Then she swept round, and fronted her husband:—a gleaming figure, like a statue cut in ivory; no colour anywhere, save the living tints of her face and eyes and hair.

"Well?" she laughed, on a low clear note of happiness. "I hope you are properly ashamed of yourself!"

But before the words were out, he had her in his arms; and for a supreme moment the great illusion was theirs that they were not two, but one, as the Book decrees.

Then she pushed him gently into a chair, and kneeling beside him drew his arm around her, resting her head against his in a fashion inexpressibly tender. The natural dignity that was hers set a high value on such sweet familiarities: and if Desmond submitted to them in silence, it was because the man in him was too deeply moved for speech.

Then she told him, at some length, all that she had gleaned of the past and present relations between Lenox and his wife.

"Now, do you see how I came to lose sight of everything for the time being?" she concluded, smiling up at him. "So far as I can gather, things seem to be at a deadlock, unless one can persuade him to take the first step forward."

"And you want to play Providence, as usual? Is that it?"

"Don't laugh at me, Theo! I am in earnest. I would gladly move heaven and earth to put things straight between them."

"But this seems a case of moving a Scot. A far tougher job, I can tell you!"

"Well, I think I moved him a little to-night; and he is coming round to-morrow for a ride." Desmond frowned; and she made haste to add; "Now that is just where I must have your co-operation, Theo, or I can do nothing. I want you to trust me, and give me a free hand for these next few weeks. Will you, . . please?"

"Does that mean I am to let you be about with Lenox as much as you choose?"

"Probably not more than I have been so far. I only want to be sure that whatever I do you won't speak to me again as you did to-night."

She felt the muscles of his arm tighten.

"I think you may feel sure of that much," he said. "But you are asking a very hard thing of me, Honor. Lenox is a thorough good chap; and I don't want to be driven into disliking him. It isn't as if I were a saint, like Paul. I'm just a man, and a grasping one at that! What's more, I am very jealous for you; and I have the right to be. Society doesn't recognise philanthropic motives. It takes you and your acts at their face value . . ."