'He is staying with Sir William Lamb,' said Dora, handing me my cup of tea. 'And I am quite jealous. Sir William, only Sir William, has been allowed to see the exhibition picture.'

'What does that portend?' I said, thoughtfully.

'I don't know. Sir William was here yesterday simply swelling with his impression of it. He says it's the finest thing that has been done in India. I told you he would conquer them.'

'You did,' and without thinking I added, 'I hope you won't be sorry that you asked him to.' It must have been an inspiration.

Armour, those weeks before the exhibition, seemed invisible. Dora reported him torn with the incapacity of the bazaar frame-maker to follow a design, and otherwise excessively occupied, and there was no lack of demands upon my own time. Besides, my ardour to be of assistance to the young man found a slight damper in the fact that he was staying with Sir William Lamb. What competence had I to be of use to the guest of Sir William Lamb?

'I do not for a moment think he will be there,' said Dora, on the day of the private view as we went along the Mall towards the Town Hall together. 'He will not run with an open mouth to his success. He will take it from us later.'

But he was there. We entered precisely at the dramatic moment of his presentation by Sir William Lamb to the Viceroy. He stood embarrassed and smiling in a little circle of compliments and congratulation. Behind him and a little to the left hung his picture, large and predominant, and in the corner of the frame was stuck the red ticket that signified the Viceroy's gold medal. We saw that, I think, before we saw anything else. Then with as little haste as was decent, considering His Excellency's proximity, we walked within range of the picture.

I am not particularly pleased, even now, to have the task of describing the thing. Its subject was an old Mahomedan priest with a green turban and a white beard exhorting a rabble of followers. I heard myself saying to Dora that it was very well painted indeed, very conscientiously painted, and that is certainly what struck me. The expression of the fire-eater's face was extremely characteristic; his arm was flung out with a gesture that perfectly matched. The group of listeners was carefully composed and most 'naturally'; that is the only word that would come to me.

I glanced almost timidly at Dora. She was regarding it with a deep vertical line between her handsome brows.

'What—on earth—has he done with himself?' she demanded, but before I could reply Armour was by our side.

'Well?' he said, looking at Dora.

'It—it's very nice,' she stammered, 'but I miss YOU.'

'She only means, you know,' I rushed in, 'that you've put in everything that was never there before. Accuracy of detail, you know, and so forth. 'Pon my word, there's some drawing in that!'

'No,' said Dora, calmly, 'what I complain of is that he has left out everything that was there before. But he has won the gold medal, and I congratulate him.'

'Well,' I said, uneasily, 'don't congratulate me. I didn't do it. Positively I am not to blame.'

'His Excellency says that it reminds him of an incident in one of Mrs. Steel's novels,' said Armour, just turning his head to ascertain His Excellency's whereabouts.

'Dear me, so it does,' I exclaimed, eagerly, 'one couldn't name the chapter—it's the general feeling.' I went on to discourse of the general feeling. Words came generously, questions with point, comments with intelligence. I swamped the situation and so carried it off.

'The Viceroy has bought the thing,' Armour went on, looking at Dora, 'and has commissioned me to paint another. The only restriction he makes is—'

'That it shall be of the same size?' asked Dora.

'That it must deal with some phase of native life.'

Miss Harris walked to a point behind us, and stood there with her eyes fixed upon the picture. I glanced at her once; her gaze was steady, but perfectly blank. Then she joined us again, and struck into the stream of my volubility.

'I am delighted,' she said, pleasantly, to Armour. 'You have done exactly what I wanted you to do. You have won the Viceroy's medal, and all the reputation there is to win in this place. Come and dine tonight, and we will rejoice together. But wasn't it—for you—a little difficult?'

He looked at her as if she had offered him a cup, and then dashed it from his lips; but the occasion was not one, of course, for crying out.

'Oh no,' he said, putting on an excellent face. 'But it took a hideous time.'



Chapter 2.X.

Within a fortnight I was surprised and a little irritated to receive from Armour the amount of my loan in full. It was not in accordance with my preconceived idea of him that he should return it at all. I had arranged in my own mind that he should be governed by the most honest impulses and the most approved intentions up to the point of departure, but that he should never find it quite convenient to pay, and that in order to effect his final shipment to other shores I should be compelled to lend him some more money. In the far future, when he should be famous and I an obscure pauper on pension, my generous imagination permitted me to see the loan repaid; but not till then. These are perhaps stereotyped and conventional lines to conceive him on, but I hardly think that anybody who has followed my little account to this point will think them unjustifiable. I looked at his cheque with disgust. That a man turns out better than you expected is no reason why you such not be annoyed that your conception of him is shattered. You may be gratified on general grounds, but distinctly put out on personal ones, especially when your conception pointed to his inevitable removal. That was the way I felt.

The cheque stood for so much more than its money value. It stood for a possible, nay, a probable capacity in Armour to take his place in the stable body of society, to recognize and make demands, to become a taxpayer, a churchgoer, a householder, a husband. As I gazed, the signature changed from that of a gnome with luminous eyes who inhabited an inaccessible crag among the rhododendrons to that of a prosperous artist-bourgeois with a silk hat for Sundays. I have in some small degree the psychological knack, I saw the possibilities of the situation with immense clearness; and I cursed the cheque.

Coincidence is odious, tells on the nerves. I never felt it more so than a week later, when I read in the 'Pioneer' the announcement of the death of my old friend Fry, Superintendent of the School of Art in Calcutta. The paragraph in which the journal dismissed poor Fry to his reward was not unkind, but it distinctly implied that the removal of Fry should include the removal of his ideas and methods, and the substitution of something rather more up to date. It remarked that the Bengali student had been pinned down long enough to drawing plaster casts, and declared that something should be done to awake within him the creative idea. I remember the phrase, it seemed so directly to suggest that the person to awake it should be Ingersoll Armour.

I turned the matter over in my mind; indeed, for the best part of an hour my brain revolved with little else. The billet was an excellent one, with very decent pay and charming quarters. It carried a pension, it was the completest sort of provision. There was a long vacation, with opportunities for original effort, and I had heard Fry call the work interesting. Fry was the kind of man to be interested in anything that gave him a living, but there was no reason why a more captious spirit, in view of the great advantages, should not accommodate itself to the routine that might present itself. The post was in the gift of the Government of Bengal, but that was no reason why the Government of Bengal should not be grateful in the difficulty of making a choice for a hint from us. The difficulty was really great. They would have to write home and advertise in the 'Athenaeum'—for some reason Indian Governments always advertise educational appointments in the 'Athenaeum'; it is a habit which dates from the days of John Company—and that would mean delay. And then the result might be a disappointment. Might Armour not also be a disappointment? That I really could not say. A new man is always a speculation, and departments, like individuals, have got to take their luck.

The Viceroy was so delighted—everybody was so delighted—with the medal picture that the merest breath blown among them would secure Armour's nomination. Should I blow that breath? These happy thoughts must always occur to somebody. This one had occurred to me. Ten to one it would occur to nobody else, and last of all to Armour himself. The advertisement might already be on its way home to the 'Athenaeum'.

It would make everything possible. It would throw a very different complexion over the idyll. It would turn that interlacing wreath of laurels and of poppies into the strongest bond in the world.

I would simply have nothing to do with it.

But there was no harm I asking Armour to dine with me; I sent the note off by messenger after breakfast and told the steward to put a magnum of Pommery to cool at seven precisely. I had some idea, I suppose, of drinking with Armour to his eternal discomfiture. Then I went to the office with a mind cleared of responsibility and comfortably pervaded with the glow of good intentions.

The moment I saw the young man, punctual and immediate and a little uncomfortable about the cuffs, I regretted not having asked one or two more fellows. It might have spoiled the occasion, but it would have saved the situation. That single glance of my accustomed eye—alas! that it was so well accustomed—revealed him anxious and screwed up, as nervous as a cat, but determined, revealed—how well I knew the signs!—that he had something confidential and important and highly personal to communicate, a matter in which I could, if I only would, be of the greatest possible assistance. From these appearances twenty years had taught me to fly to any burrow, but your dinner-table offers no retreat; you are hoist, so to speak, on your own carving-fork. There are men, of course, and even women, who have scruples about taking advantage of so intimate and unguarded an opportunity, but Armour, I rapidly decided, was not one of these. His sophistication was progressing, but it had not reached that point. He wanted something—I flew instantly to the mad conclusion that he wanted Dora. I did not pause to inquire why he should ask her of me. It had seemed for a long time eminently proper that anybody who wanted Dora should ask her of me. The application was impossible, but applications nearly always were impossible. Nobody knew that better than the Secretary to the Government of India in the Home Department.

I squared my shoulders and we got through the soup. It was necessary to apologize for the fish. 'I suppose one must remember,' I said, 'that it has to climb six thousand feet,' when suddenly he burst out.

'Sir William Lamb tells me,' he said, and stopped to swallow some wine, 'that there is something very good going in Calcutta and that I should ask you to help me to get it. May I?'

So the miserable idea—the happy thought—had occurred to somebody else.

'Is there?' I said, with interest and attention.

'It's something in the School of Art. A man named Fry has died.'

'Ah!' I said, 'a man named Fry. He, I think was Director of that institution.' I looked at Armour in the considering, measuring way with which we suggest to candidates for posts that their fitness to fill them is not to be absolutely taken for granted. 'Fry was a man of fifty-six,' I said.

'I am thirty.' He certainly did not look it, but years often fall lightly upon a temperament.

'It's a vile climate.'

'I know. Is it too vile, do you think,' he said anxiously, 'to ask a lady to share?'

'Lots of ladies do share it,' I replied, with amazing calmness; 'but I must decline absolutely to enter into that.'

My frown was so forbidding that he couldn't and didn't dare to go on. He looked dashed and disappointed; he was really a fool of an applicant, quite ready to retire from the siege on the first intimation that the gates were not to be thrown open at his approach.

'Do you think you would like teaching?' I asked.

'I can teach. Miss—my only pupil here has made capital progress.'

'I am afraid you must not measure the Bengali art student by the standard of Miss Harris,' I replied coldly. He WAS a fool. We talked of other things. I led him on to betray his ludicrous lack of knowledge of the world in various directions. At other times it had irritated me, that night it gave me purest pleasure. I agreed with him about everything.

As he selected his smoke to go home with I said, 'Send your application in to the Director of Public Instruction, Bengal—Lamb will tell you how—and I'll see what I can do.'

They were only too thankful to get him. As a student it seemed he had been diligent both in London and Paris; he possessed diplomas or some such things bearing names which were bound to have weight with a Department of Public Instruction anywhere. I felt particularly thankful for this, for I was committed to him if he had not a rag to show.

The matter was settled in three weeks, during which Armour became more and more the fashion in Simla. He was given every opportunity of experiment in the society of which he was about to become a permanent item. He dined out four or five times a week, and learned exactly what to talk about. He surprised me one day with a piece of news of my own department, which was a liberty of a very serious kind, but I forgave him upon finding that it was not true. He rode Lamb's weight-carriers, to cross which his short legs were barely adequate, and apart from this disadvantage he did not ride them badly. Only one thing marred the completeness of the transformation—he didn't dismiss the dog. The dog, fundamentally, was still and ever his companion. It was a suspicious circumstance if we had known; but we saw in it only a kind heart, and ignored it.

I saw little of Dora Harris at this time. Making no doubt that she was enjoying her triumph as she deserved, I took the liberty of supposing that she would hardly wish to share so intimate a source of satisfaction. I met them both several times at people's houses—certain things had apparently been taken for granted—but I was only one of the little circle that wondered how soon it might venture upon open congratulations. The rest of us knew as much, it seemed, as Edward Harris did. Lady Pilkey asked him point-blank, and he said what his daughter found to like in the fellow the Lord only knew, and he was glad to say that at present he had no announcement to make. Lady Pilkey told me she thought it very romantic—like marrying a newspaper correspondent—but I pointed to a lifelong task, with a pension attached, of teaching fat young Bengalis to draw, and asked her if she saw extravagant romance in that.

They wrote up from Calcutta that they would like to have a look at Armour before making the final recommendation, and he left us, I remember, by the mail tonga of the third of June. He dropped into my office to say goodbye, but I was busy with the Member and could see nobody, so he left a card with 'P.P.C.' on it. I kept the card by accident, and I keep it still by design, for the sake of that inscription.

Strobo had given up his hotel in Simla to start one in Calcutta. It never occurred to me that Armour might go to Strobo's; but it was, of course, the natural thing for him to do, especially as Strobo happened to be in Calcutta himself at the time. He went and stayed with Strobo, and every day he and the Signor, clad in bath-towels, lay in closed rooms under punkahs and had iced drinks in the long tumblers of the East, and smoked and talked away the burden of the hours.

Strobo was in Calcutta to meet a friend, an Austrian, who was shortly leaving India in the Messagerie Maritimes steamer Dupleix after agreeable wanderings disguised as a fakir in Tibet; and to this friend was attached, in what capacity I never thought well to inquire, a lady who was a Pole, and played and sang as well as Strobo fiddled. I believe they dined together every night, this precious quartet, and exchanged in various tongues their impressions of India under British control. 'A houri in stays,' the lady who was a Pole described it. I believe she herself was a houri without them. And at midnight, when the south wind was cool and strong from the river, Strobo and Armour would walk up Chowringhee Road and look at the red brick School of Art from the outside in the light of the street lamps, as a preliminary to our friend's final acceptance of the task of superintending it from within.

We in Simla, of course, knew nothing of all this at the time; the details leaked out later when Strobo came up again. I began to feel some joyful anxiety when in a letter dated a week after Armour's arrival in Calcutta, the Director of Public Instruction wrote to inquire whether he had yet left Simla; but the sweet blow did not fall with any precision or certainty until the newspaper arrived containing his name immediately under that of Herr Vanrig and Mme. Dansky in the list of passengers who had sailed per S.S. Dupleix on the fifteenth of June for Colombo. There it was, 'I. Armour,' as significant as ever to two persons intimately concerned with it, but no longer a wrapping of mystery, rather a radiating centre of light. Its power of illumination was such that it tried my eyes. I closed them to recall the outlines of the School of Art—it had been built in a fit of economy—and the headings of the last Director's report, which I had kindly sent after Armour to Calcutta. Perhaps that had been the last straw.

The real meaning of the task of implanting Western ideals in the Eastern mind rose before me when I thought of Armour's doing it—how they would dwindle in the process, and how he must go on handling them and looking at them withered and shrunken for twenty-odd years. I understood—there was enough left in me to understand—Armour's terrified escape. I was happy in the thought of him, sailing down the Bay. The possibilities of marriage, social position, assured income, support in old age, the strands in the bond that held him, the bond that holds us all, had been untwisting, untwisting, from the third of June to the fifteenth. The strand that stood for Dora doubtless was the last to break, but it did not detract from my beatitude to know that even this consideration, before the Dupleix and liberty, failed to hold.

I kept out of Miss Harris's way so studiously for the next week or two that she was kind enough in the end to feel compelled to send for me. I went with misgivings—I expected, as may be imagined, to be very deeply distressed. She met me with a storm of gay reproaches. I had never seen her in better health or spirits. My surprise must have been more evident than I supposed or intended, for before I went away she told me the whole story. By that time she had heard from Ceylon, a delicious letter with a pen-and-ink sketch at the top. I have it still; it infallibly brought the man back to me. But it was all over; she assured me with shining eyes that it was. The reason of her plainly boundless thankfulness that Armour had run away from the School of Art did not come to the surface until I was just going. Then I gathered that if he had taken the post she would have felt compelled, compelled by all she had done for him, to share its honours with him; and this, ever since at her bidding he had begun to gather such things up, was precisely what she had lost all inclination to do.

We were married the following October. We had a big, gorgeous official wedding, which we both enjoyed enormously. I took furlough, and we went home, but we found London very expensive and the country very slow; and with my K.C.S.I. came the offer of the Membership, so we went back to Simla for three perfectly unnecessary years, which we now look back upon with pleasure and regret. I fear that we, no more than Ingersoll Armour, were quite whole-hearted Bohemians; but I don't know that we really ever pretended to be.



3. The Hesitation of Miss Anderson.

Chapter 3.I.

When it became known that Madeline Anderson had finally decided to go abroad for two years, her little circle in New York naturally talked a good deal, in review, about her curious reason for never having gone before. So much that happened afterward, so much that I am going to tell, depends upon this reason for not going before, that I also must talk about it and explain it; I could never bring it out just as we went along. It would have been a curious reason in connection with anybody, but doubly so as explaining the behaviour of Miss Anderson, whose profile gave you the impression that she was anything but the shuttlecock of her emotions. Shortly, her reason was a convict, Number 1596, who, up to February in that year, had been working, or rather waiting, out his sentence in the State penitentiary. So long as he worked or waited, Madeline remained in New York, but when in February death gave him his quittance, she took her freedom too, with wide intentions and many coupons.

Earlier in his career Number 1596 had been known in New York society as Mr. Frederick Prendergast, and for a little while he was disapproved there on the score of having engaged himself to a Miss Anderson, Madeline Anderson, whom nobody knew anything about. There was her own little circle, as I have said, and it lacked neither dignity nor refinement, but I doubt whether any member of it was valeted from London, or could imply, in conversation, a personal acquaintance with Yvette Guilbert. There is no need, however, to insist that there are many persons of comfortable income and much cultivation in New York, who would not be met by strangers having what are called the 'best' introductions there. The best so often fails to include the better. It may be accepted that Madeline Anderson and her people were of these, and that she wondered sometimes during the brief days of her engagement what it would be like to belong to the brilliant little world about her that had its visiting list in London, Paris, or St. Petersburg, and was immensely entertained by the gaucheries of the great ones of the earth.

Then came, with the most unexceptionable introductions, Miss Violet Forde, from a Sloane Square address, London. She came leaning on the arm of a brother, the only relative she had in the world, and so brilliant was the form of these young people that it occurred to nobody to imagine that it had the most precarious pecuniary foundation, must have faded and shrivelled indeed, after another year or two of anything but hospitality as generous as that of New York. Well-nourished and undimmed, however, it concealed for them admirably the fact that it was the hospitality they were after, and not the bracing climate or the desire to see the fascinating Americans of London and Paris at home. New York found them agreeable specimens of high-spirited young English people, and played with them indefinitely. Miss Forde, when she sat imperturbably on a cushion in the middle of the floor after dinner and sang to a guitar the songs of Albert Chevalier, was an anomaly in English decorum that was as pleasing to observe as it was amusing to criticize.

The Americans she met delighted in drawing her out—it was a pastime that took the lead at dinner-parties, to an extent which her hostess often thought preposterous—and she responded with naivete and vigour, perfectly aware that she was scoring all along the line. Upon many charming people she made the impression that she was a type of the most finished class of what they called 'English society girls,' that she represented the best they could do over there in this direction. As a matter of fact she might have sat to any of those 'black and white' artists, who draw townish young women of London, saying cynical things to young men in the weekly papers. That was her type, and if you look for her picture there, you will see that her face was very accurately oval, with eyes that knew their value, and other features that didn't very much matter, except in so far as they expressed a very full conception of the satisfactions of this life, and a wide philosophy as to methods of obtaining them.

Frederick Prendergast was unacquainted with the popular pictures I have mentioned, having a very reasonable preference for the illustrated papers of his own country; otherwise—there is no telling—he might have observed the resemblance and escaped the State prison, whither he assuredly never would have gone had he married Madeline Anderson—as he fully intended to do when Miss Forde came over. He was worth at that time a great deal of money, besides being more personable than any one would have believed who knew him as '1596.' His fiancee was never too obtrusively in evidence, and if Miss Forde thought of Miss Anderson with any scruple, it was probably to reflect that if she could not take care of these things she did not deserve to have them. This at all events was how her attitude expressed itself practically; and the upshot was that Miss Anderson lost them. There came a day when Frederick Prendergast, in much discomfort of mind, took to Violet the news that Madeline had brought their engagement to an end. She, Violet, gave him some tea, and they talked frankly of the absurd misconception of the relations between them upon which his dismissal was founded; and Prendergast went away much comforted and wholly disposed to respect Miss Anderson's startling wishes. She, with what both the others thought excellent taste, persuaded her mother and sister to move to Brooklyn; and so far as the thoroughfares and social theatres of New York were concerned, the city over the river might have been a nunnery which had closed its gates upon her. It was only in imagination that she heard Frederick Prendergast's wedding-bells when, two months later, he was united to Miss Forde in Grace Church, and that after the fact, their melody being brought to her inner sense next day by the marriage notice in the 'Tribune'.

It would be painful, in view of what we know of Frederick Prendergast, to dwell upon what Madeline Anderson undeniably felt. Besides her emotions were not destructively acute, they only lasted longer than any one could have either expected or approved. She suffered for him as well; she saw as plainly as he did the first sordid consequences of his mistake the afternoon he came to solicit her friendship, having lost other claims; and it was then perhaps, that her responsibility in allowing Violet Forde to spoil his life for him began to suggest itself to her. Up to that time she had thought of the matter differently, as she would have said, selfishly. He was not permitted to come again; but he went away lightened, inasmuch as he had added his burden to hers.

When a year later the national credit involved that of Prendergast's firm, Madeline read financial articles in the newspapers with heavy concern, surprising her family with views on 'sound money'; and when, shortly afterward, his partners brought that unhappy young man before the criminal courts for an irregular use of the firm's signature, which further involved it beyond hope of extrication, there was no moment of the day which did not find her, in spirit, beside him there.

The case dragged on through appeal, and the decision of the lower courts was not reversed. The day this became known the fact also transpired that poor Prendergast would never live to complete his ten years' term of imprisonment. He went to prison with hardly more than one lung, and in the most favourable physical condition to get rid of the other. Mrs. Prendergast wept a little over the installation, and assured Frederick that it was perfectly absurd; they were certain to get him out again; people always got people out again in America. She took him grapes and flowers once a week for about a month, and then she sailed for Europe. She put it about that her stay was to be as brief as was consistent with the transaction of certain necessary business in London; but she never came back, and Madeline Anderson had taken her place, in so far as the grapes and flowers were concerned, for many months, when the announcement of his wife's death reached Prendergast in an English paper published in Paris. About a year after that it began to be thought singular how he picked up in health, and Madeline's mother and sister occasionally romanced about the possibility of his recovering and marrying her after all—they had an enormous opinion of the artistic virtue of forgiveness—but it was not a contingency ever seriously contemplated by Miss Anderson herself. Her affection, pricked on by remorse, had long satisfied itself with the duties of her ministry. If she would not leave him until he died, it was because there was no one but herself to brighten the long day in the prison hospital for him, because she had thrown him into the arms of the woman who had deserted him, because he represented in her fancy her life's only budding towards the sun. Her patience lasted through six years, which was four years longer than any doctor had given Frederick Prendergast to live; but when one last morning she found an empty bed, and learned that Number 1596 had been discharged in his coffin, she rose from the shock with the sense of a task fully performed and a well-developed desire to see what else there might be in the world.

She announced her intention of travelling for a year or two with a maid, and her family expressed the usual acquiescence. It would help her, they said, to 'shake it off'; but they said that to one another. They were not aware—and it would have spoiled an ideal for them if they had been—that she had shaken it off, quite completely, into Prendergast's grave.

This was the curious reason why Miss Anderson's travels were so long postponed.



Chapter 3.II.

It was Madeline's fancy to enjoy the contrast between West and East in all its sharpness, so she and Brookes embarked at San Francisco for Yokohama. Their wanderings in Japan were ideal, in spite of Brookes's ungrateful statement that she could have done with fewer eggs and more bacon; and Madeline prolonged the appeal of the country to her sense of humour and fantasy, putting off her departure for India from week to week. She went at last in March; and found herself down with fever at Benares in the middle of one particularly hot April, two months after the last of her fellow travellers had sailed from Bombay, haunted on her baking pillow by pictorial views of the burning ghat and the vultures. The station doctor, using appalling language to her punkah-coolie, ordered her to the hills; and thus it was that she went to Simla, where she had no intention of going, and where this story really begins.

Brookes has always declared that Providence in sending Miss Anderson to Simla had it in mind to prevent a tragedy; but as to that there is room for a difference of opinion: besides I can not be anticipated by Brookes.

'It's the oddest place imaginable, and in many ways the most delightful,' Madeline wrote to her sister Adele, 'this microcosm of Indian official society withdrawn from all the world, and playing at being a municipality on three Himalayan mountaintops. You can't imagine its individuality, its airy, unsubstantial, superior poise. How can I explain to you elderly gentlemen, whose faces express daily electric communications with the Secretary of State, playing tennis violently every single afternoon in striped flannels—writing letters of admonition to the Amir all day long, and in the evening, with the assistance of yellow wigs and make-up sticks from the Calcutta hair-dresser, imagining that they produce things, poor dears, only a LITTLE less well done than is done at the Lyceum? Nothing is beyond them. I assure you they are contemplating at the moment 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray'. The effect of remoteness from the world, I suppose, and the enormous mutual appreciation of people who have watched each other climb. For to arrive officially at Simla they have had to climb in more ways than one...It is all so hilarious, so high-spirited, so young and yet, my word! what a cult of official dignity underlying! I saw a staff-officer in full uniform, red and white feathers and all, going to the birthday dinner at the Viceroy's the other evening in a perambulator—rickshaw, you know, such as they have in Japan. That is typical of the place. All the honours and dignities—and a perambulator to put them in—or a ridiculous little white-washed house made of mud and tin, and calling itself Warwick Castle, Blenheim, Abbotsford! They haven't a very good hold, these Simla residences, and sometimes they slip fifty yards or so down the mountain-side, but the chimneys (bad pun coming) are never any more out of drawing than they were before.

'Yet—never forget—the queer little place has a nobility, drawn I suppose from high standards of conduct in essentials.

'...This matter of precedence is a bore for an outsider. I am very tired of being taken in to dinner by subalterns, because I have no "official position." Something of the kind was offered me, by the way, the other day, by a little gunner with red eyelids, in the Ordnance Department, named McDermott—Captain McDermott. He took my declining very cheerfully, said he knew Americans didn't like Englishmen, who hadn't been taught to pronounce their "g's," but hoped I would change my mind before the rains, when he was goin' down. Of course I sha'n't. The red eyelids alone...I am living in a boarding-house precisely under the deodars, and have "tiffin" with Mrs. Hauksbee every day when neither of us are having it anywhere else. And I've been told the original of "General Bangs," "that most immoral man." You remember, don't you, the heliograph incident—I needn't quote it. It really happened! and the General still lives, none the worse—perhaps rather greater. Quite half the people seem materializations of Kipling, and it's very interesting; but one mustn't say so if one wants to be popular. Talking of materializations, I saw the original of Crawford's Mr. Isaacs, too, the other day. He used to be a diamond agent among the native princes when Crawford knew him. When I saw him he was auctioning off his collection of curios and things. These types of novelists look wonderfully little impaired; I suppose it's the dry air.

'P.S.—Brookes is also quite happy. She was much struck, on arriving, by an apparent anomaly in nature. "Have you noticed, ma'am," said she, "how at this height all the birds are crows and monkeys?"'

Miss Anderson described Simla exhaustively in her letters to New York. She touched upon almost every feature, from Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge, whose husbands were perspiring in the Plains, and nobody telling them anything, to the much larger number of ladies interested in the work of the Young Women's Christian Association; from the 'type' of the Military Secretary to the Viceroy to that of Ali Buksh, who sold raw turquoises in a little carved shop in the bazaar. I should like to quote more of her letters, but if I did I should find nothing about Colonel Horace Innes, who represented—she often acknowledged to herself—her only serious interest. Miss Anderson took the world at its own light valuation as it came; but she had a scale of recognitions and acceptances, which she kept apart for the very few, and Innes had claimed a place in it the first time they met. It seems a trifle ungrateful that she should have left him out, since it was he who gave her a standard by which to measure the frivolity of Simla. He went to gymkhanas—if he knew she was going—but he towered almost pictorially above them; and when he talked to Madeline his shoulders expressed a resentment of possible interruptions that isolated him still further. I would not suggest that he was superior by conviction; he was only intent, whereas most of the other people were extremely diffused, and discriminating, while the intimacies of the rest were practically coextensive with Government House list. Neither, for his part, would he admit that the tone of Simla was as wholly flippant as I have implied. They often talked about it; he recognized it as a feature likely to compel the attention of people from other parts of the world; and one afternoon he asked her, with some directness, if she could see no tragedies underneath.

'Tragedies of the heart?' she asked. 'Oh, I can not take them seriously. The emotion is so ephemeral! A woman came to tea with me three days ago, and made me her confessor. It was unexpected; if it hadn't been, I wouldn't have asked her to tea. She was so unhappy that she forgot about the rouge, and it all came off on her handkerchief when she cried. The man likes somebody else better this season. Well, I gave her nougat and cheap cynicisms, and she allowed herself to be comforted! Why, the loves of kitchen-maids are more dignified.'

They were riding on the broad four-mile road, blasted out of the rock, that winds round Jakko. The deodars stood thick above them, with the sunlight filtering through; a thousand feet below lay the little square fields, yellow and green, of the King of Koti. The purple-brown Himalayas shouldered the eye out to the horizon, and there the Snows lifted themselves, hardly more palpable than the drifted clouds, except for a gleam of ice in their whiteness. A low stone wall ran along the verge of the precipice, and, looking down, they saw tangled patches of the white wild rose of the Himalayas, waving and drooping over the abyss.

'I am afraid,' said Innes, 'you are not even upon the fringe of the situation.'

'It's the situation as I see it.'

'Then—excuse me—you do not see deep enough. That poor lady suffered, I suppose, to the extent of her capacity. You would not have have increased it.'

'I don't know, I should have preferred not to measure it.'

'Besides, that was not quite the sort of thing I had in mind. I was thinking more of the—separations.'

'Ah!' said Madeline.

'It's not fair to ask women to live much in India. Sometimes it's the children, sometimes it's ill health, sometimes it's natural antipathy to the place; there's always a reason to take them away.'

'Yes,' said Madeline, turning a glance of scrutiny on him. His face was impassive; he was watching mechanically for a chance to slay a teasing green spider-fly.

'That is the beginning of the tragedy I was thinking of. Time does the rest, time and the aridity of separations. How many men and women can hold themselves together with letters? I don't mean aging or any physical change. I don't mean change at all.'

'No,' said Madeline, and this time, though her curiosity was greater, she did not look at him.

'No. The mind could accustom itself to expect that, and so forestall the blow, if it really would be a blow, which I doubt. For myself, I'm pretty sure that nothing of that kind could have much effect upon one's feeling, if it were the real thing.' He spoke practically to himself, as if he had reasoned this out many times.

'Oh, no!' said Madeline.

'But separation can do a worse thing than that. It can REINTRODUCE people, having deprived them of their mutual illusion under which they married. If they lived together the illusion would go, I suppose, but custom and comfort would step in to prevent a jar. There never would be that awful revelation of indifference.'

He stopped sharply, and the hope went through Madeline's mind that her face expressed no personal concern for him. There was a small red stain in the brown of his cheek as he looked at her to find out, and he added, 'I've known—in Bombay—one or two bad cases of that. But, of course, it is the wife who suffers most. Shall we canter on?'

'In a minute,' said Madeline, and he drew his rein again.

She could not let this be the last word; he must not imagine that she had seen, through the simple crystal of his convictions, the personal situation that gave them to him.

'Of course,' she said, thoughtfully, 'you know the Anglo-Indian world and I don't. You must have observed this that you speak of it; it sounds only too probable. And I confess it makes my little impression very vulgar and superficial.' She turned her head and a candid smile to him. 'All the same, I fancy that the people who are capable of suffering much that way are the exceptions. And—I don't care—I believe there is more cheap sentiment in this place than the other kind. What do you think I heard a woman say the other day at a tiffin-party? "No man has touched my heart since I've been married," she proclaimed, "except my husband!" AT A TIFFIN-party!'

She heard the relief in Innes's laugh and was satisfied.

'How does it happen,' he said, 'that women nowadays are critical of the world so young?'

'I shall be thirty in September, and we no longer look at society through a tambour-frame,' she said, hardily.

'And I shall be forty-three next month, but hitherto I have known it to produce nothing like you,' he returned, and if there was ambiguity in his phrase there was none in his face.

Miss Anderson made with her head her little smiling gesture—Simla called it very American—which expressed that all chivalrous speech was to be taken for granted and meant nothing whatever; and as they turned into the Ladies' Mile gave her horse his head, and herself a chance for meditation. She thought of the matter again that evening before her little fire of snapping deodar twigs, thought of it intently. She remembered it all with perfect distinctness; she might have been listening to a telephonic reproduction.

It was the almost intimate glimpse Innes had given her of himself, and it brought her an excitement which she did not think of analyzing. She wrung from every sentence its last possibility of unconscious meaning, and she found when she had finished that it was eleven o'clock.

Then she went to bed, preferring not to call Brookes, with the somewhat foolish feeling of being unable to account for her evening. Her last reflection before she slept shaped itself in her mind in definite words.

'There are no children,' it ran, 'and her health has always been good, he says. She must have left him after that first six months in Lucknow, because of a natural antipathy to the country—and when she condescended to come out again for a winter he met the different lady he thinks about. With little hard lines around the mouth and common conventional habits of thought, full of subservience to his official superiors, and perfectly uninterested in him except as the source of supplies. But I don't know why I should WANT her to be so disagreeable.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Innes, travelling at the moment with the mails from London to Bombay, was hastening to present to Miss Anderson features astonishingly different.



Chapter 3.III.

The lady guests at Peliti's—Mrs. Jack Owen and the rest—were giving a tea in the hotel pavilion. They had the band, the wife of the Commander-in-Chief, the governess from Viceregal Lodge and one little Viceregal girl, three A.D.C.'s, one member of council, and the Archdeacon. These were the main features, moving among a hundred or so of people more miscellaneous, who, like the ladies at Peliti's, had come up out of the seething Plains to the Paradise of the summer capital. The Pavilion overhung the Mall; looking down one could see the coming and going of leisurely Government peons in scarlet and gold, Cashmiri vendors of great bales of embroideries and skins, big-turbaned Pahari horse-dealers, chaffering in groups, and here and there a mounted Secretary-sahib trotting to the Club. Beyond, the hills dipped blue and bluer to the plains, and against them hung a single waving yellow laburnum, a note of imagination. Madeline Anderson was looking at it when Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge came up with an affectionate observation upon the cut of her skirt, after which Mrs. Mickie harked back to what they had been talking about before.

'She's straight enough now, I suppose,' this lady said.

'She goes down. But she gives people a good deal of latitude for speculation.'

'Who is this?' asked Madeline. 'I ask for information, to keep out of her way. I find I am developing the most shocking curiosity. I must be in a position to check it.'

The ladies exchanged hardly perceptible glances. Then Mrs. Gammidge said, 'Mrs. Innes,' and looked as if, for the moment, at any rate, she would withhold further judgment.

'But you mustn't avoid the poor lady,' put in Mrs. Mickie, 'simply because of her past. It wouldn't be fair. Besides—'

'Her past?' Madeline made one little effort to look indifferent, and then let the question leap up in her.

'My dear,' said Mrs. Gammidge, with brief impatience, 'he married her in Cairo, and she was—dancing there. Case of chivalry, I believe, though there are different versions. Awful row in the regiment—he had to take a year's leave. Then he succeeded to the command, and the Twenty-third were ordered out here. She came with him to Lucknow—and made slaves of every one of them. They'll swear to you now that she was staying at Shepheard's with an invalid mother when he met her. And now she's accepted like everybody else; and that's all there is about it.'

'There's nothing in that,' said Madeline, determinedly, 'to prove that she wasn't—respectable.'

'N—no. Of course not,' and again the eye of Mrs. Gammidge met that of Mrs. Mickie.

'Though, you see love,' added the latter lady, 'it would have been nicer for his people—they've never spoken to him since—if she had been making her living otherwise in Cairo.'

'As a barmaid, for instance,' said Madeline, sarcastically.

'As a barmaid, for instance,' repeated Mrs. Gammidge, calmly.

'But Simla isn't related to him—Simla doesn't care!' Mrs. Mickie exclaimed. 'Everybody will be as polite as possible when she turns up. You'll see. You knew, didn't you, that she was coming out in the Caledonia?'

'No,' said Madeline. She looked carefully where she was going to put her coffee-cup, and then she glanced out again at the laburnum hanging over the plains. 'I—I am glad to hear it. These separations you take so lightly out here are miserable, tragic.'

The other ladies did not exchange glances this time. Miss Anderson's change of tone was too marked for comment which she might have detected.

'Colonel Innes got the telegram this morning. She wired from Brindisi,' Mrs. Gammidge said.

'Does he seem pleased?' asked Mrs. Mickie, demurely.

'He said he was afraid she would find it very hot coming up here from Bombay. And, of course, he is worried about a house. When a man has been living for months at the Club—'

'Of course, poor fellow! I do love that dear old Colonel Innes, though I can't say I know him a bit. He won't take the trouble to be nice to me, but I am perfectly certain he must be the dearest old thing inside of him. Worth any dozen of these little bow-wows that run round after rickshaws,' said Mrs. Mickie, with candour.

'I think he's a ridiculous old glacier,' Mrs. Gammidge remarked, and Mrs. Mickie looked at Madeline and said, 'Slap her!'

'What for?' asked Miss Anderson, with composure. 'I dare say he is—occasionally. It isn't a bad thing to be, I should think, in Indian temperatures.'

'I guess you got it that time, dear lady,' said Mrs. Mickie to Mrs. Gammidge, as Madeline slipped toward the door.

'Meant to be cross, did she? How silly of her! If she gives her little heart away like that often, people will begin to make remarks.'

'The worst of that girl is,' Mrs. Mickie continued, 'that you never can depend upon her. For days together she'll be just as giddy and jolly as anybody and then suddenly she'll give you a nasty superior bit of ice down the back of your neck like that. I've got her coming to tea tomorrow afternoon,' Mrs. Mickie added, with sudden gloom, 'and little Lord Billy and all that set are coming. They'll throw buns at each other—I know they will. What, in heaven's name, made me ask her?'

'Oh, she'll have recovered by then. You must make allowance for the shock we gave her, poor dear. Consider how you would feel if Lady Worsley suddenly appeared upon the scene, and demanded devotion from Sir Frank.'

'She wouldn't get it,' Mrs. Mickie dimpled candidly. 'Frank always loses his heart and his conscience at the same time. But you don't suppose there's anything serious in this affair? Pure pretty platonics, I should call it.'

Mrs. Gammidge lifted her eyebrows. 'I dare say that is what they imagine it. Well, they're never in the same room for two minutes without being aware of it, and their absorption when they get in a corner—I saw her keep the Viceroy waiting, the other night after dinner, while Colonel Innes finished a sentence. And then she was annoyed at the interruption. Here's Kitty Vesey, lookin' SUCH a dog! Hello, Kitty! where did you get that hat, where did you get that tile? But that wasn't the colour of your hair last week, Kitty!'

'Don't feel any kind of a dog'—Mrs. Vesey's pout, though becoming, was genuine. 'I'm in a perfectly furious rage, my dears, and I'm coming home to cry, just as soon as I've had an ice. What do you think—they won't let me have Val for Captain Wynne's part in 'The Outcast Pearl'—they say he's been tried before, and he's a stick. Did you ever hear of such brutes? They want me to act with Major Dalton, and he's MUCH too old for the part.'

'Kitten,' said Mrs. Mickie, with conviction, 'Valentine Drake on the stage would be fatal to your affection for him.'

'I don't care, I won't act with anybody else—I'll throw up the part. Haven't I got to make love to the man? How am I to play up to such an unkissable-looking animal as Major Dalton? I shall CERTAINLY throw up the part.'

'Don't do anything rash, Kitty. If you do, they'll probably offer it to me, and I warn you I won't give it back to you.'

'Oh, refuse it, like a dear! I am dying to put them in a hole. It's jealousy, that's what it is. Goodbye, Mrs. Jack, I've had a lovely time. Val and I have been explaining our affection to the Archdeacon, and he says it's perfectly innocent. We're going to get him to put it on paper to produce when Jimmy sues for a divorce, aren't we, Val?'

'You're not going?' said Mrs. Jack Owen.

'Oh, yes, I must. But I've enjoyed myself awfully, and so has everybody I've been talking to. I say, Mickie, dear—about tomorrow afternoon—I suppose I may bring Val?'

'Oh, dear, yes,' Mrs. Mickie replied. 'But you must let me hold his hand.'

'I don't know which of you is the most ridiculous,' Mrs. Owen remarked; 'I shall write to both your husbands this very night,' but as the group shifted and left her alone with Mrs. Gammidge, she said she didn't know whether Mrs. Vesey would be quite so chirpy three weeks hence. 'When Mrs. Innes comes out,' she added in explanation. 'Oh, yes, Valentine Drake is quite her property. My own idea is that Kitty won't be in it.'

Where the road past Peliti's dips to the Mall Madeline met Horace Innes. When she appeared in her rickshaw he dismounted, and gave the reins to his syce. She saw in his eyes the look of a person who has been all day lapsing into meditation and rousing himself from it. 'You are very late,' she said as he came up.

'Oh, I'm not going; at least, you are just coming away, aren't you? I think it is too late. I'll turn back with you.'

'Do,' she said, and looked at his capable, sensitive hand as he laid it on the side of her little carriage. Miss Anderson had not the accomplishment of palm-reading, but she took general manual impressions. She had observed Colonel Innes's hand before, but it had never offered itself so intimately to her inspection. That, perhaps, was why the conviction seemed new to her, as she thought 'He is admirable—and it is all there.'

When they got to the level Mall he kept his hold, which was a perfectly natural and proper thing for him to do, walking alongside; but she still looked at it.

'I have heard your good news,' she said, smiling congratulation at him.

'My good news? Oh, about my wife, of course. Yes, she ought to be here by the end of the month. I thought of writing to tell you when the telegram came, and then I—didn't. The files drove it out of my head, I fancy.'

'Heavy day?'

'Yes,' he said, absently. They went along together in an intimacy of silence, and Madeline was quite aware of the effort with which she said:

'I shall look forward to meeting Mrs. Innes.'

It was plain that his smile was perfunctory, but he put it on with creditable alacrity.

'She will be delighted. My wife is a clever woman,' he went on, 'very bright and attractive. She keeps people well amused.'

'She must be a great success in India, then.'

'I think she is liked. She has a tremendous fund of humour and spirits. A fellow feels terribly dull beside her sometimes.'

Madeline cast a quick glance at him, but he was only occupied to find other matters with which he might commend his wife.

'She is very fond of animals,' he said, 'and she sings and plays well—really extremely well.'

'That must be charming,' murmured Madeline, privately iterating, 'He doesn't mean to damn her—he doesn't mean to damn her.' 'Have you a photograph of her?'

'Quantities of them,' he said, with simplicity.

'You have never shown me one. But how could you?' she added in haste; 'a photograph is always about the size of a door nowadays. It is simply impossible to keep one's friends and relations in a pocketbook as one used to do.'

They might have stopped there, but some demon of persistence drove Madeline on. She besought help from her imagination; she was not for the moment honest. It was an impulse—an equivocal impulse—born doubtless of the equivocal situation, and it ended badly.

'She will bring something of the spring out to you,' said Madeline—'the spring in England. How many years is it since you have seen it? There will be a breath of the cowslips about her, and in her eyes the soft wet of the English sky. Oh, you will be very glad to see her.' The girl was well aware of her insincerity, but only dimly of her cruelty. She was drawn on by something stronger than her sense of honesty and humanity, a determination to see, to know, that swept these things away.

Innes's hand tightened on the rickshaw, and he made at first no answer. Then he said:

'She has been staying in town, you know.'

There was just a quiver of Madeline's eyelid; it said nothing of the natural rapacity behind. This man's testimony was coming out in throes, and yet—it must be said—again she probed.

'Then she will put you in touch again,' she cried; 'you will remember when you see her all the vigour of great issues and the fascination of great personalities. For a little while, anyway, after she comes, you will be in a world—far away from here—where people talk and think and live.'

He looked at her in wonder, not understanding, as indeed how could he?

'Why,' he said, 'you speak of what YOU have done'; and before the truth of this she cast down her eyes and turned a hot, deep red, and had nothing to say.

'No,' he said, 'my wife is not like that.'

He walked along in absorption, from which he roused himself with resentment in his voice.

'I can not leave such a fabric of illusion in your mind. It irritates me that it should be there—about anybody belonging to me. My wife is not in the least what you imagine her. She has her virtues, but she is—like the rest. I can not hope that you will take to her, and she won't like you either—we never care about the same people. And we shall see nothing of you—nothing. I can hardly believe that I am saying this of my own wife, but—I wish that she had stayed in England.'

'Mrs. Mickie!' cried Madeline to a passing rickshaw, 'what are you rushing on like that for? Just go quietly and peaceably along with us, please, and tell us what Mrs. Vesey decided to do about her part in 'The Outcast Pearl'. I'm dining out tonight—I must know.' And Mrs. Mickie was kind enough to accompany them all the rest of the way.

Miss Anderson dined out, and preferred to suppose that she had no time to think until she was on her way home along the empty road round Jakko at eleven o'clock that night. Then it pleased her to get out of her rickshaw and walk. There was an opulent moon, the vast hills curving down to the plains were all grey and silvery, and the deodars overhead fretted the road with dramatic shadows. About her hung the great stillness in a mighty loneliness in which little Simla is set, and it freed her from what had happened, so that she could look at it and cry out. She actually did speak, pausing in the little pavilion on the road where the nursemaids gather in the daytime, but very low, so that her words fell round her even in that silence, and hardly a deodar was aware. 'I will not go now,' she said. 'I will stay and realize that he is another woman's husband. That should cure me if anything will—to see him surrounded by the commonplaces of married life, that kind of married life. I will stay till she comes and a fortnight after. Besides, I want to see her—I want to see how far she comes short.' She was silent for a moment, and the moonlight played upon her smile of quiet triumph. 'He cares too,' she said; 'he cares too, but he doesn't know it, and I promise you one thing, Madeline Anderson, you won't help him to find out. And in five weeks I will go away and leave my love where I found it—on a mountaintop in the middle of Asia!'



Chapter 3.IV.

Madeline did her best to make certain changes delicately, imperceptibly, so that Innes would not, above all things, be perplexed into seeking for their reason. The walks and rides came to a vague conclusion, and Miss Anderson no longer kept the Viceroy or anybody else waiting, while Innes finished what he had to say to her in public, since his opportunities for talking to her seemed to become gradually more and more like everybody else's. So long as she had been mistress of herself she was indifferent to the very tolerant and good-natured gossip of the hill capital; but as soon as she found her citadel undermined, the lightest kind of comment became a contingency unbearable. In arranging to make it impossible, she was really over-considerate and over-careful. Her soldier never thought of analyzing his bad luck or searching for motive in it. To him the combinations of circumstances that seemed always to deprive him of former pleasures were simply among the things that might happen. Grieving, she left him under that impression for the sake of its expediency, and tried to make it by being more than ever agreeable on the occasions when he came and demanded a cup of tea, and would not be denied. After all, she consoled herself, no situation was improved by being turned too suddenly upside down.

She did not wholly withdraw his privilege of taking counsel with her, and he continued to go away freshened and calmed, leaving her to toss little sad reflections into the fire, and tremulously wonder whether the jewel of her love had flashed ever so little behind the eyes. They both saw it a conspicuous thing that as those three weeks went on, neither he nor she alluded even remotely to Mrs. Innes, but the fact remained, and they allowed it to remain.

Nevertheless, Madeline knew precisely when that lady was expected, and as she sauntered in the bazaar one morning, and heard Innes's steps and voice behind her, her mind became one acute surmise as to whether he could possibly postpone the announcement any longer. But he immediately made it plain that this was his business in stopping to speak to her. 'Good morning,' he said, and then, 'My wife comes tomorrow.' He had not told her a bit of personal news, he had made her an official communication, as briefly as it could be done, and he would have raised his hat and gone on without more words if Madeline had not thwarted him. 'What a stupidity for him to be haunted by afterward!' was the essence of the thought that visited her; and she put out a detaining hand.

'Really! By the Bombay mail, I suppose—no, an hour or so later; private tongas are always as much as that behind the mail.'

'About eleven, I fancy. You—you are not inclined for a canter round Summer Hill before breakfast?'

'I am terrified of Summer Hill. The Turk always misbehaves there. Yesterday he got one leg well over the khud—I WAS thankful he had four. Tell me, are you ready for Mrs. Innes—everything in the house? Is there anything I can do?

'Oh, thanks very much! I don't think so. The house isn't ready, as a matter of fact, but two or three people have offered to put us up for a day or so until it is. I've left it open till my wife comes, as I dare say she has already arranged to go to somebody. What are you buying? Country tobacco, upon my word! For your men? That's subversive of all discipline!'

The lines on his face relaxed; he looked at her with fond recognition of another delightful thing in her.

'You give sugar-cane to your horses,' she declared; 'why shouldn't I give tobacco to mine? Goodbye; I hope Mrs. Innes will like "Two Gables". There are roses waiting for her in the garden, at all events.'

'Are there?' he said. 'I didn't notice. Goodbye, then.'

He went on to his office thinking of the roses, and that they were in his garden, and that Madeline had seen them there. He thought that if they were good roses—in fact, any kind of roses—they should be taken care of, and he asked a Deputy Assistant Inspector-General of Ordnance whether he knew of a gardener that was worth anything.

'Most of them are mere coolies,' said Colonel Innes, 'and I've got some roses in this little place I've taken that I want to look after.'

Next day Madeline took Brookes, and 'The Amazing Marriage', and a lunch-basket, and went out to Mashobra, where the deodars shadow hardly any scandal at all, and the Snows come, with perceptible confidence, a little nearer.

'They almost step,' she said to Brookes, looking at them, 'out of the realm of the imagination.'

Brookes said that they did indeed, and hoped that she hadn't by any chance forgotten the mustard.

'The wind is keen off the glaciers over there—anybody would think of a condiment,' Miss Anderson remarked in deprecation, and to this Brookes made no response. It was a liberty she often felt compelled to take.

The Snows appealed to Madeline even more than did Carintha, Countess of Fleetwood, to whose fortunes she gave long pauses while she looked across their summits at renunciation, and fancied her spirit made strong and equal to its task. She was glad of their sanctuary; she did not know where she should find such another. Perhaps the spectacle was more than ever sublime in its alternative to the one she had come away to postpone the sight of; at all events it drove the reunion of the Inneses from her mind several times for five minutes together, during which she thought of Horace by himself, and went over, by way of preparation for her departure, all that had come and gone between them. There had been luminous moments, especially as they irradiated him, and she dwelt on these. There was no reason why she should not preserve in London or in New York a careful memory of them.

So the lights were twinkling all up and down and round about Simla when she cantered back to it and it was late when she started for the Worsleys, where she was dining. One little lighted house looked much like another perched on the mountainside, and the wooden board painted 'Branksome Hall, Maj.-Gen. T.P. Worsley, R.E.,' nailed to the most conspicuous tree from the main road, was invisible in the darkness. Madeline arrived in consequence at the wrong dinner-party, and was acclaimed and redirected with much gaiety, which gave her a further agreeable impression of the insouciance of Simla, but made her later still at the Worsleys. So that half the people were already seated when she at last appeared, and her hostess had just time to cry, 'My dear, we thought the langurs must have eaten you! Captain Gordon, you are not abandoned after all. You know Miss Anderson?' when she found herself before her soup.

Captain Gordon heard her account of herself with complacence, and declared, wiping his moustache, that a similar experience had befallen him only a fortnight before.

'Did you ever hear the story of that absent-minded chap, Sir James Jackson, who went to the RIGHT dinner-party by mistake?' he asked, 'and apologized like mad, by Jove! and insisted he couldn't stay. The people nearly had to tie him down in his—' Captain Gordon stopped, arrested by his companion's sudden and complete inattention.

'I see a lady,' interrupted Madeline, with odd distinctness, 'curiously like somebody I have known before.' Her eyes convinced themselves, and then refused to be convinced of the inconceivable fact that they were resting on Violet Prendergast. It was at first too amazing, too amazing only. Then an old forgotten feeling rose in her bosom; the hand on the stem of her wine-glass grew tense. The sensation fell away; she remembered her emancipation, the years arose and reassured her during which Violet Prendergast, living or dead, had been to her of absolutely no importance. Yet there was a little aroused tremour in her voice as she went on, 'She is on the General's right—he must have taken her in. Can you see from where you are sitting?'

'These narrow oval tables are a nuisance that way, aren't they? You don't know who you're dining with till the end of the function. Oh! I see—that's Mrs. Innes, just out, and fresh as paint, isn't she? The Colonel'—Captain Gordon craned his head again—'is sitting fourth from me on this side.'

'Mrs. Innes! Really!' said Madeline. 'Then—then of course I must be mistaken.'

She removed her eyes almost stealthily from the other woman's face and fixed them on the pattern of the table-cloth. Her brain guided her clearly through the tumult of her perception, and no emotion could be observed in the smiling attention which she gave to Captain Gordon's account of the afternoon's tandem racing; but there was a furious beating in her breast, and she thought she could never draw a breath long enough to control it. It helped her that there was food to swallow, wine to drink, and Captain Gordon to listen to; and under cover of these things she gradually, consciously, prepared herself for the shock of encounter which should be conclusive. Presently she leaned a little forward and let her glance, in which no outsider could see the steady recognition, rest upon the lady on the General's right, until that person's agreeable blue eyes wandered down the table and met it. Perhaps Madeline's own eyelids fluttered a little as she saw the sudden stricture in the face that received her message, and the grimace with which it uttered, pallid with apprehension, its response to a pleasantry of General Worsley's. She was not consummate in her self-control, but she was able at all events to send the glance travelling prettily on with a casual smile for an intervening friend, and bring it back to her dinner-roll without mischief. It did not adventure again; she knew, and she set herself to hold her knowledge, to look at it and understand it, while the mechanical part of her made up its mind about the entrees, and sympathized with Captain Gordon on his hard luck in having three ponies laid up at once. She did not look again, although she felt the watching of the other woman, and was quite aware of the moment at which Mrs. Innes allowed herself the reprieve of believing that at the Worsley's dinner-party at least there would be no scandal. The belief had its reflex action, doing something to calm her. How could there be—scandal—she asked herself, and dismissed with relief the denunciations which crowded vague but insistent in her brain. Even then she had not grasped the salient points of the situation; she was too much occupied with its irony as it affected her personally; her impressions circled steadily round the word 'twice' and the unimaginable coincidence. Her resentment filled her, and her indignation was like a clear flame behind her smiling face. Robbed twice, once in New York and—oh! preposterous—the second time in Simla! Robbed of the same things by the same hand! She perceived in the shock of it only a monstrous fatality, a ludicrously wicked chance. This may have been due to the necessity of listening to Captain Gordon.

At all events it was only as she passed Colonel Innes on her way to the drawing-room and saw ahead of her the very modish receding back of Mrs. Innes that she realized other things—crime and freedom.

It was the reversion of power; it brought her a great exultation. She sat down under it in a corner, hoping to be left alone, with a white face and shining eyes. Power and opportunity and purpose—righteous purpose!

The circumstances had come to her in a flash; she brought them up again steadily and scrutinized them. The case was absolutely clear. Frank Prendergast had been dead just seven months. Colonel Innes imagined himself married four years. Violet Prendergast was a bigamist, and Horace Innes had no wife.

That was the marvellous transcendent fact; that was what lifted her and carried her on great pulsing waves that rolled beyond the walls of the little fripperied drawing-room and its collection of low-necked women, out into her life, which had not these boundaries. She lived again in a possible world. There was no stone wall between herself and joy.

The old Mussulman butler who offered her coffee looked at her with aroused curiosity—here was certainly a memsahib under the favour of God—and as she stirred it, the shadow that Violet Prendergast had thrown upon her life faded out of her mind in the light that was there. Then she looked up and met that lady's vivid blue eyes. Mrs. Innes's colour had not returned, but there was a recklessness in the lines of her mouth. In the way she held her chin, expressing that she had been reflecting on old scores, and anticipated the worst. Meeting this vigilance Miss Anderson experienced a slight recoil. Her happiness, she realized, had been brought to her in the hands of ugly circumstance.

'And so melodramatic,' she told herself. 'It is really almost vulgar. In a story I should have no patience with it.' But she went on stirring her coffee with a little uncontrollable smile.

A moment later she had to contemplate the circumstance that her hostess was addressing her. Mrs. Innes wished to be introduced. Mrs. Innes, incarnate, conscious sensation, was smiling at her, saying that she must know so great a friend of her husband's. He made so few friends, and she was so grateful to anybody who was good to him. Eyes and voice tolerably in rein, aware of the situation at every point, she had a meretricious daring; and it occurred to Madeline, looking at her, that she was after all a fairly competent second-class adventuress. She would not refuse the cue. It would make so little difference.

'On the contrary, I am tremendously indebted to Colonel Innes. He has been so very kind about ponies and jhampanies and things. Simla is full of pitfalls for a stranger, don't you think?' And Miss Anderson, unclosing her fan, turned her reposeful head a little in the direction of three married schoolgirls voluble on her left.

'Not when you get to know the language. You must learn the language; it's indispensable. But of course it depends on how long you mean to stay.'

'I think I will learn the language,' said Madeline.

'But General Worsley told me you were leaving Simla in a fortnight.'

'Oh no. My plans are very indefinite; but I shall stay much longer than that.'

'It is Miss Anderson, isn't it?—Miss Madeline Anderson, of New York—no, Brooklyn?'

Madeline looked at her. 'Did not the General say so?' she asked.

'Yes, he did. But one looks to make quite sure.'

'I can understand that.'

Mrs. Innes leaned forward with one elbow on her knee.

It was not a graceful attitude, but it gave the casual air to the conversation which was desirable.

'What are you going to do?' she said.

'My plans are as indefinite as possible, really,' Madeline returned. 'I may spend the cold weather in Calcutta, or go into camp with the Dovedells—I should like that.'

'Mrs. Innes,' cried the nearest schoolgirl, 'we are coming tomorrow to see all the lovely things in your boxes, may we?'

'Do, duckies. But mind, no copying of them by durzies in the veranda. They're all Paris things—Coulter's—and you know he doesn't copy well, does he? Oh, dear! here are the men—they always come too soon, don't they? So glad to have had even a little chat, Miss Anderson. I'll come and see you tomorrow. You know newcomers in India always make the first calls. I shall find you at home, sha'n't I?'

'By all means,' Madeline said.

Mrs. Innes crossed the room, crying out that the heat was perfectly absurd for Simla, it must be cooler outside; and as Captain Valentine Drake followed her into the semi-darkness of the veranda, the three married schoolgirls looked at each other and smiled.

'Don't be naughty,' said Captain Gordon, leaning over the sofa from behind. 'They're very dear friends, and they've been separated for two years.'

Madeline heard this as plainly as they did. She noted disdainfully how it all fell in.

'How absent you are tonight!' Horace Innes exclaimed, when Miss Anderson had asked him a trivial question for the third time.

'Hush!' she said. 'Mrs. Scallepa is going to sing;' and as Mrs. Scallepa sang she let her eyes play over him with a light in them so tender, that once catching it the felt a sudden answering throb, and looked again; but after that her eyes were on the floor.

'We are staying here,' he said a quarter of an hour later, as he saw her into her rickshaw; 'and I think I must see you to your quarters. It's very dark, and there is an ugly little slip half-way between this and the Mall.

He ran upstairs to get his coat and stick, and a white face like an apparition suddenly hung itself on the edge of Madeline's rickshaw-hood.

'Don't tell him tonight,' it said, hoarsely.

'Are you ready, Colonel Innes? Then good night, everybody,' cried Madeline.

She was not at all sure that she would not tell Horace Innes 'tonight'.



Chapter 3.V.

'My wife,' said Colonel Innes, 'is looking extremely well.'

'She seems so, indeed,' Madeline replied.

'She is delighted with "Two Gables". Likes it better, she says, than any other house we could have got.'

'What a good thing!'

'It was a record trip for the Caledonia, thirteen days from Brindisi to Bombay. Was she telling you about the voyage?'

'No,' said Madeline impatiently, 'she didn't mention it. How shall I tell the men to put down the hood, please? A rickshaw is detestable with the hood up—stifling! Thanks. I beg your pardon. The Caledonia made a good run?'

'Thirteen days. Wonderful weather, of course, which was luck for Violet. She is an atrocious sailor.'

Madeline fancied she heard repose and reassurance in his voice. Her thought cried, 'It is not so bad as he expected!' We can not be surprised that she failed to see in herself the alleviation of that first evening.

'She has brought quantities of things for the house with her,' Innes went on, 'as well as three dachshund puppies,' and he laughed. 'Wouldn't you like one? What can we do with three—and the terrier, and Brutus?'

'Oh, thank you, no.'

How could he laugh? How could he speak pleasantly of these intimate details of his bondage? How could he conceive that she would accept—

'Already she has arranged four dinner-parties! It will be a relief not to have to think of that sort of thing—to be able to leave it to her.'

'Mrs. Innes must have great energy. To drive all the way up from Kalka by noon and appear at a dinner-party at night—wonderful!'

'Oh, great energy,' Horace said.

'She will take you everywhere—to all the functions. She will insist on your duty to society.'

Madeline felt that she must get him somehow back into his slough of despond. His freedom paralyzed her. And he returned with a pathetic change of tone.

'I suppose there is no alternative. Violet is very good about being willing to go alone, or with somebody else; but I never think it quite fair on one's wife to impose on her the necessity of going about with other men.'

'Mrs. Worsley introduced us after dinner,' said Madeline.

She kept disparagement out of her mind, but he could not help perceiving aloofness.

'Yes?'

The monosyllable told her sensitive ear that while he admitted her consideration in going on with the subject, he was willing to recognize that there was no more to say, and have done with it. She gathered up her scruples and repugnances in a firm grasp. She would not let him throw his own shadow, as an effectual obstacle, between himself and liberty.

'I am going to ask you something,' she said; it might come naturally enough from another man with whom your friendship was as candid as it is with me; but there is an awkwardness in it from a woman. You must believe I have a good reason. Will you tell me about your first meeting with Mrs. Innes, when—when you became engaged?'

She knew she was daring a good deal; but when a man's prison is to be brought down about his ears, one might as well begin, she thought, at the foundation.

For a moment Innes did not speak, and then his words came slowly.

I find it difficult,' he said, 'to answer you. How can it matter—it is impossible. I suppose you have heard some story, and it is like you to want to be in a position to negative it. Ignore it instead. She has very successfully championed herself. Believe nothing to her disadvantage that may be said about that—that time. I was pleased to marry her, and she was pleased to marry me. But for God's sake don't let us talk about it!'

As he spoke Madeline saw the vivid clearness of the situation grow blurred and confused. It was as if her point of view had suddenly changed and her eyes failed her. Her eager impulse had beat less and less strongly from the Worsley's door; now it seemed to shrink away in fetters. Her eyes filled with vaguely resentful tears, which sprang, if she could have traced them, from the fact that the man she loved was loyal to his own mistake, and the formless premonition that he might continue to be. She contorted her lip to keep her emotion back, and deliberately turned away from a matter in which she was not mistress, and which contained ugly possibilities of buffeting. She would wait a little, and though consideration for Violet Prendergast had nothing to do with it, she would not tell him tonight.

'I am sorry,' she said; and, after a moment, 'Did I tell you that I have changed my plans?'

'You are not going so soon?' she took all the comfort there was in his eagerness.

'I am not going at all for the present. I have abandoned my intentions and my dates. I mean to drift for a little while. I have been too—too conscientious.'

'Are you quite serious—do you mean it?'

'Indeed I do.'

'And in less than a fortnight you will not go out of one's life. You will stay on—you summer day! It's hard to believe in luck like that. I sent a poor devil of a sepoy a reprieve last week—one knows now how he must have felt about it.'

'Does it make all that difference?' Madeline asked, softly.

'It makes a difference,' he answered, controlling his words, 'that I am glad you can not conceive, since that would mean that your life has been as barren as mine.' He seemed to refrain from saying more, and then he added, 'You must be careful when you plant your friendship that you mean it to stay, and blossom. It will not come easily up by the roots, and it will leave an ugly hole.'

He was helping her out of her rickshaw, and as they followed the servant who carried her wraps the few yards to the door, she left her hand lightly on his arm. It was the seal, he thought, of her unwritten bond that there should be no uprooting of the single flower he cherished; and he went back almost buoyantly because of it to the woman who had been sitting in the sackcloth and ashes of misfortune, turning over the expedients for which his step might make occasion.

By the time the monkeys began to scramble about the roof in the early creeping of the dawn among the deodars, Madeline had groped her way to a tolerably clear conception of what might happen. The impeding circumstance everywhere, it must be acknowledged, was Frederick Prendergast's coffin. The case, had convict No. 1596 been still alive and working out his debt to society, would have been transcendentally simple, she told herself. Even a convict has a right—a prospective right—to his wife, and no honest man should be compelled to retain a criminal's property. This was an odd reflection, perhaps, to be made by Madeline Anderson, but the situation as a whole might be described as curious. And there was no doubt about the coffin.



Chapter 3.VI.

The veranda of which Miss Anderson's little sitting-room claimed its section hung over the road, and it seemed to her that she heard the sound of Mrs. Innes's arrival about ten minutes after breakfast.

On the contrary, she had spent two whole hours contemplating, with very fixed attention, first the domestic circumstances of Colonel Horace Innes and their possible development, and then, with a pang of profoundest acknowledgment, the moral qualities which he would bring to bear upon them. She was further from knowing what course she personally intended to pursue than ever, when she heard the wheels roll up underneath; and she had worked herself into a state of sufficient detachment from the whole problem to reflect upon the absurdity of a bigamist rattling forth to discuss her probable ruin in the fanciful gaiety of a rickshaw. The circumstances had its value though; it lightened all responsibility for the lady concerned. As Madeline heard her jump out and give pronounced orders for the securing of an accompanying dachshund, it did not seem to matter so particularly what became of Violet Prendergast.

Mrs. Innes's footsteps came briskly along the veranda. Madeline noted that there was no lagging. 'Number seven,' she said aloud; as she passed other doors, 'Number eight—number nine! Ah! there you are.' The door was open. 'I wouldn't let them bring up my card for fear of some mistake. How do you do? Now please don't get up—you look so comfortable with your book. What is it? Oh, yes, of course, THAT. People were talking about it a good deal when I left London, but I haven't read it. Is it good?'

'I like it,' said Madeline. She half rose as Mrs. Innes entered; but as the lady did not seem to miss the ceremony of greeting, she was glad to sink back in her chair.

'And how do you like Simla? Charming in many ways, isn't it? A little too flippant, I always say—rather TOO much champagne and silliness. But awfully bracing.'

'The Snows are magnificent,' Madeline said, 'when you can see them. And there's a lot of good work done here.'

'Aren't they divine? I did nothing, absolutely nothing, my first season but paint them. And the shops—they're not bad, are they, for the size of the place? Though today, upon my soul, there doesn't seem to be a yard of white spotted veiling among them.'

'That is annoying,' said Madeline, 'if you want spotted veiling.'

'Isn't it? Well'—Mrs. Innes take a deep breath—'you DIDN'T tell him last night?'

'N—no,' said Madeline, with deliberation.

'I WAS grateful. I knew I could rely upon you not to. It would have been too cruel when we have only just been reunited—dear Horace would have had to sleep in the—'

'Pray—'

'Well, Horace is the soul of honour. Is your ayah in there?' Mrs. Innes nodded towards the bedroom door. 'You can not imagine what long ears she has.'

'I have no ayah. There is only Brookes;' and as that excellent woman passed through the room with a towel over her arm, Madeline said, 'You can go now, Brookes, and see about that alpaca. Take the rickshaw; it looks very threatening.'

'Maid! You ARE a swell! There are only four genuine maids in Simla that I know of—the rest are really nurse-girls. What a comfort she must be! THE luxury of all others that I long for; but alas! army pay, you know. I did once bring a dear thing out with me from Nice—you should have seen Horace's face.'

'I couldn't very well go about quite alone; it would be uncomfortable.'

'Except that you Americans are so perfectly independent.'

'On the contrary. If I could order about a servant the way an Englishwoman does—'

'Say you are not going to tell him! I've got such a lot of other calls to make,' exclaimed Mrs. Innes. 'Dear Lady Bloomfield won't understand it if I don't call today, especially after the baby. What people in that position want with more babies I can not comprehend. Of course you haven't noticed it, but a baby is such a shock to Simla.'

'Don't let me keep you,' Madeline said, rising.

'But you haven't promised. Do promise, Miss Anderson. You gain nothing by telling him, except your revenge; and I should think by this time you would have forgiven me for taking Frederick away from you. He didn't turn out so well! You can't still bear me malice over that convict in Sing Sing.'

'For his sake, poor fellow, I might.'

'Coming along I said to myself, "She CAN score off me badly, but surely she doesn't want to so much as all that." Besides, I really only took your leavings, you know. You threw poor Fred Prendergast over.'

'I am not prepared to discuss that,' Madeline said, at no pains to smooth the curve out of her lip.

'Then I thought, "Perhaps—you never can tell with people—she will think it her DUTY to make a fuss."'

'That is a possible point of view.'

'I know. You think I'm an imposter on society and I ought to be exposed, and I suppose you could shut every door in Simla against me if you liked. But you are a friend of my husband's, Miss Anderson. You would not turn his whole married life into a scandal and ruin his career?'

'Ruin his career?'

'Of course. Government is awfully particular. It mayn't be his fault in the least, but no man is likely to get any big position with a cloud over his domestic affairs. Horace would resign, naturally.'

'Or take long leave,' Mrs. Innes added to herself, but she did not give Madeline this alternative. A line or two of nervous irritation marked themselves about her eyes, and her colour had faded. Her hat was less becoming than it had been, and she had pulled a button off her glove.

'Besides,' she went on quickly, 'it isn't as if you could do any good, you know. The harm was done once for all when I let him think he'd married me. I thought then—well, I had to take it or leave it—and every week I expected to hear of Frederick's death. Then I meant to tell Horace myself, and have the ceremony over again. He couldn't refuse. And all these years it's been like living on a volcano, in the fear of meeting New York people. Out here there never are any, but in England I dye my hair, and alter my complexion.'

'Why did you change your mind,' Madeline asked, 'about telling Colonel Innes?'

'I haven't! Why should I change my mind? For my own protection, I mean to get things put straight instantly—when the time comes.'

'When the time comes,' Madeline repeated; and her eyes, as she fixed them on Mrs. Innes, were suddenly so lightened with a new idea that she dropped the lids over them as she waited for the answer.

'When poor Frederick does pass away,' Mrs. Innes said, with an air of observing the proprieties. 'When they put him in prison it was a matter of months, the doctors said. That was one reason why I went abroad. I couldn't bear to stay there and see him dying by inches, poor fellow.'

'Couldn't you?'

'Oh, I couldn't. And the idea of the hard labour made me SICK. But it seems to have improved his health, and now—there is no telling! I sometimes believe he will live out his sentence. Should you think that possible in the case of a man with half a lung?'

'I have no knowledge of pulmonary disease,' Madeline said. She forced the words from her lips and carefully looked away, taking this second key to the situation mechanically, and for a moment groping with it.

'What arrangement did you make to be informed about—about him?' she asked, and instantly regretted having gone so perilously near provoking a direct question.

'I subscribe to the "New York World". I used to see lots of things in it—about the shock the news of my death gave him—'

A flash of hysterical amusement shot into Mrs. Innes's eyes, and she questioned Madeline's face to see whether it responded to her humour. Then she put her own features straight behind her handkerchief and went on.

'And about his failing health, and then about his being so much better. But nothing now for ages.'

'Did the "World" tell you,' asked Miss Anderson, with sudden interest, 'that Mr. Prendergast came into a considerable fortune before—about two years ago?'

Mrs. Innes's face turned suddenly blank. 'How much?' she exclaimed.

'About five hundred thousand dollars, I believe. Left him by a cousin. Then you didn't know?'

'That must have been Gordon Prendergast—the engineer!' Mrs. Innes said, with excitement. 'Fancy that! Leaving money to a relation in Sing Sing! Hadn't altered his will, I suppose. Who could possibly,' and her face fell visibly, 'have foreseen such a thing?'

'No one, I think,' said Madeline, through a little edged smile. 'On that point you will hardly be criticized.'

Mrs. Innes, with clasped hands, was sunk in thought. She raised her eyes with a conviction in them which she evidently felt to be pathetic.

'After all,' she said, 'there is something in what the padres say about our reaping the reward of our misdeeds in this world—some of us, anyway. If I had stayed in New York—'

'Yes?' said Madeline. 'I shall wake up presently,' she reflected, 'and find that I have been dreaming melodrama.' But that was a fantastic underscoring of her experience. She knew very well she was making it.

Mrs. Innes, again wrapped in astonished contemplation, did not reply. Then she jumped to her feet with a gesture that cast fortunes back into the lap of fate.

'One thing is certain,' she said; 'I can't do anything NOW, can I?'

Madeline laid hold of silence and made armour with it. At all events, she must have time to think.

'I decline to advise you,' she said, and she spoke with a barely perceptive movement of her lips only. The rest of her face was stone.

'How unkind and unforgiving you are! Must people would think the loss of a hundred thousand pounds about punishment enough for what I have done. You don't seem to see it. But on top of that you won't refuse to promise not to tell Horace?'

'I will not bind myself in any way whatever.'

'Not even when you know that the moment I hear of the—death I intend to—to—'

'Make an honest man of him? Not even when I know that.'

'Do you want me to go down on my knees to you?'

Madeline glanced at the flowered fabric involved and said, 'I wouldn't, I think.'

'And this is to hang over me the whole season? I shall enjoy nothing—absolutely NOTHING.' The blue eyes were suddenly eclipsed by angry tears, which the advent of a servant with cards checked as suddenly.

'Goodbye, then, dear,' cried Mrs. Innes, as if in response to the advancing rustle of skirts in the veranda. 'So glad to have found you at home. Dear me, has Trilby made her way up—and I gave such particular orders! Oh, you NAUGHTY dog!'



Chapter 3.VII.

From the complication that surged round Miss Anderson's waking hours one point emerged, and gave her a perch for congratulation. That was the determination she had shown in refusing to let Frederick Prendergast leave her his money, or any part of it.

It has been said that he had outlived her tenderness, if not her care, and this fact, which she never found it necessary to communicate to poor Frederick himself, naturally made his desire in the matter sharply distasteful. She was even unaware of the disposition he had made of his ironical fortune, a reflection which brought her thankfulness that there was something she did not know. 'If I had let him do it,' she thought, 'I should have felt compelled to tell her everything, instantly. And think of discussing it with her!' This was quite a fortnight later, and Mrs. Innes still occupied her remarkable position only in her own mind and Madeline's, still knowing herself the wife of 1596 and of 1596 only, and still unaware that 1596 was in his grave. Simla had gone on with its dances and dinners and gymkhanas quite as if no crucial experience were hanging over the heads of three of the people one met 'everywhere,' and the three people continued to be met everywhere, although only one of them was unconscious. The women tried to avoid each other without accenting it, exchanging light words only as occasion demanded, but they were not clever enough for Mrs. Gammidge and Mrs. Mickie, who went about saying that Mrs. Innes's treatment of Madeline Anderson was as ridiculous as it was inexplicable. 'Did you ever know her to be jealous of anybody before?' demanded Mrs. Mickie, to which Mrs. Gammidge responded, with her customary humour, that the Colonel had never, in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, been known to give her occasion.

'Well,' declared Mrs. Mickie, 'if friendships—UNSENTIMENTAL friendships—between men and women are not understood in Simla, I'd like to be told what is understood.'

Between them they gave Madeline a noble support, for which—although she did not particularly require it, and they did not venture to offer it in so many words—she was grateful. A breath of public criticism from any point of view would have blown over the toppling structure she was defending against her conscience. The siege was severe and obstinate, with an undermining conviction ever at work that in the end she would yield; in the end she would go away, at least as far as Bombay or Calcutta, and from there send to Mrs. Innes the news of her liberation. It would not be necessary, after all, or even excusable, to tell Horace. His wife would do that quickly enough—at least, she had said she would. If she didn't—well, if she didn't, nothing would be possible but another letter, giving HIM the simple facts, she, Madeline, carefully out of the way of his path of duty—at all events, at Calcutta or Bombay. But there was no danger that Mrs. Innes would lose the advantage of confession, of throwing herself on his generosity—and at this point Madeline usually felt her defenses against her better nature considerably strengthened, and the date of her sacrifice grow vague again.

Meanwhile, she was astonished to observe that, in spite of her threat to the contrary, Mrs. Innes appeared to be enjoying herself particularly well. Madeline had frequent occasion for private comment on the advantages of a temperament that could find satisfaction in dancing through whole programmes at the very door, so to speak, of the criminal courts; and it can not be denied that this capacity of Mrs. Innes's went far to increase the vacillation with which Miss Anderson considered her duty towards that lady. If she had shown traces of a single hour of genuine suffering, there would have been an end to Madeline's hesitation. But beyond an occasional watchful glance at conversations in which she might be figuring dramatically, and upon which she instantly turned her back as soon as she was perceived, Mrs. Innes gave no sign even of preoccupation. If she had bad half-hours, they occurred between the teas and tennises, the picnics, riding-parties, luncheons, and other entertainments, at which you could always count upon meeting her; and in that case they must have been short. She looked extremely well, and her admirable frocks gave an accent even to 'Birthday' functions at Viceregal Lodge, which were quite hopelessly general. If any one could have compelled a revelation of her mind, I think it would have transpired that her anxieties about Capt. Valentine Drake and Mrs. Vesey gave her no leisure for lesser ones. These for a few days had been keen and indignant—Captain Drake had so far forgotten himself as to ride with Mrs. Vesey twice since Mrs. Innes's arrival—and any display of poverty of spirit was naturally impossible under the circumstances. The moment was a critical one; Captain Drake seemed inclined to place her in the category of old, unexacting friends—ladies who looked on and smiled, content to give him tea on rainy days, and call him by his Christian name, with perhaps the privilege of a tapping finger on his shoulder, and an occasional order about a rickshaw. Mrs. Violet was not an introspective person, or she might have discovered here that the most stable part of her self-respect was her EXIGENCE with Captain Drake.

She found out quickly enough, however, that she did not mean to discard it. She threw herself, therefore—her fine shoulders and arms, her pretty clothes, her hilarity, her complexion, her eyelashes, and all that appertained to her—into the critical task of making other men believe, at Captain Drake's expense, that they were quite as fond of her as he was. Mrs. Vesey took opposite measures, and the Club laid bets on the result.

The Club was not prepossessed by Captain Drake. He said too little and he implied too much. He had magnificent shoulders, which he bent a great deal over secluded sofas, and a very languid interest in matters over which ordinary men were enthusiastic. He seemed to believe that if he smiled all the way across his face, he would damage a conventionality. His clothes were unexceptionable, and he always did the right thing, though bored by the necessity. He was good-looking in an ugly way, which gave him an air of restrained capacity for melodrama, and made women think him interesting. Somebody with a knack of disparagement said that he was too much expressed. It rather added to his unpopularity that he was a man whom women usually took with preposterous seriousness—all but Kitty Vesey, who charmed and held him by her outrageous liberties. When Mrs. Vesey chaffed him, he felt picturesque. He was also aware of inspiring entertainment for the lookers-on, with the feeling at such times that he, too, was an amused spectator. This was, of course, their public attitude. In private there was sentiment, and they talked about the tyranny of society, or delivered themselves of ideas suggested by works of fiction which everybody simply HAD to read.