For a week Mrs. Innes looked on, apparently indifferent, rather apparently not observing; and an Assistant Secretary in the Home Department began to fancy that his patience in teaching the three dachshund puppies tricks was really appreciated. He was an on-coming Assistant Secretary, with other conspicuous parts, and hitherto his time had been too valuable to spend upon ladies' dachshunds. Mrs. Innes had selected him well. There came an evening when, at a dance at the Lieutenant-Governor's, Mrs. Innes was so absorbed in what the Assistant Secretary was saying to her, as she passed on his arm, that she did not see Captain Drake in the corridor at all, although he had carefully broken an engagement to walk with Kitty Vesey that very afternoon, as the beginning of gradual and painless reform in her direction. His unrewarded virtue rose up and surprised him with the distinctness of its resentment; and while his expression was successfully amused, his shoulders and the back of his neck, as well as the hand on his moustache, spoke of discipline which promised to be efficient. Reflection assured him that discipline was after all deserved, and a quarter of an hour later found him wagging his tail, so to speak, over Mrs. Innes's programme in a corner pleasantly isolated. The other chair was occupied by the Assistant Secretary. Captain Drake represented an interruption, and was obliged to take a step towards the nearest lamp to read the card. Three dances were rather ostentatiously left, and Drake initialled them all. He brought back the card with a bow, which spoke of dignity under bitter usage, together with the inflexible intention of courteous self-control, and turned away.

'Oh, if you please, Captain Drake—let me see what you've done. All those? But—'

'Isn't it after eleven, Mrs. Innes?' asked the Assistant Secretary, with a timid smile. He was enjoying himself, but he had a respect for vested interests, and those of Captain Drake were so well known that he felt a little like a buccaneer.

'Dear me, so it is!' Mrs. Innes glanced at one of her bracelets. 'Then, Captain Drake, I'm sorry'—she carefully crossed out the three 'V.D.'s'—'I promised all the dances I had left after ten to Mr. Holmcroft. Most of the others I gave away at the gymkhana—really. Why weren't you there? That Persian tutor again! I'm afraid you are working too hard. And what did the Rani do, Mr. Holmcroft? It's like the Arabian Nights, only with real jewels—'

'Oh, I say, Holmcroft, this is too much luck, you know. Regular sweepstakes, by Jove!' And Captain Drake lingered on the fringe of the situation.

'Perhaps I have been greedy,' said the Assistant Secretary, deprecatingly. 'I'll—'

'Not in the very least! That is,' exclaimed Mrs. Violet, pouting, 'if I'M to be considered. We'll sit out all but the waltzes, and you shall tell me official secrets about the Rani. She put us up once, she's a delicious old thing. Gave us string beds to sleep on and gold plate to eat from, and swore about every other word. She had been investing in Government paper, and it had dropped three points. "Just my damn luck!" she said. Wasn't it exquisite? Captain Drake—'

'Mrs. Innes—'

'I don't want to be rude, but you're a dreadful embarrassment. Mr. Holmcroft won't tell you official secrets!'

'If she would only behave!' thought Madeline, looking on, 'I would tell her—indeed I would—at once.'

Colonel Innes detached himself from a group of men in mess dress as she appeared with the Worsleys, and let himself drift with the tide that brought them always together.

'You are looking tired—ill,' she said, seriously, as they sought the unconfessed solace of each other's eyes. 'Last night it was the Commander-in-Chief's, and the night before the dance at Peliti's. And again tonight. And you are not like those of us who can rest next morning—you have always your heavy office work!' She spoke with indignant, tender reproach, and he gave himself up to hearing it. 'You will have to take leave and go away,' she insisted, foolishly.

'Leave! Good heavens, no! I wish all our fellows were as fit as I am. And—'

'Yes?' she said.

'Don't pity me, dear friend. I don't think it's good for me. The world really uses me very well.'

'Then it's all right, I suppose,' Madeline said, with sudden depression.

'Of course it is. You are dining with us on the eighth?'

'I'm afraid not, I'm engaged.'

'Engaged again? Don't you WANT to break bread in my house, Miss Anderson?' She was silent, and he insisted, 'Tell me,' he said.

She gave him instead a kind, mysterious smile.

'I will explain to you what I feel about that some day,' she said; 'some day soon. I can't accept Mrs. Innes's invitation for the eighth, but—Brookes and I are going to take tea with the fakir's monkeys on the top of Jakko tomorrow afternoon.'

'Anybody else, or only Brookes?'

'Only Brookes.' And she thought she had abandoned coquetry!

'Then may I come?'

'Indeed you may.'

'I really don't know,' reflected Madeline, as she caught another glimpse of Mrs. Innes vigorously dancing the reel opposite little Lord Billy in his Highland uniform, with her hands on her flowered-satin hips, 'that I am behaving very well myself.'



Chapter 3.VIII.

Horace Innes looked round his wife's drawing-room as if he were making an inventory of it, carefully giving each article its value, which happened, however, to have nothing to do with rupees. Madeline Anderson had been saying something the day before about the intimacy and accuracy with which people's walls expressed them, and though the commonplace was not new to him, this was the first time it had ever led him to scan his wife's. What he saw may be imagined, but his only distinct reflection was that he had no idea that she had been photographed so variously or had so many friends who wore resplendent Staff uniforms. The relation of cheapness in porcelain ornaments to the lady's individuality was beyond him, and he could not analyze his feelings of sitting in the midst of her poverty of spirit. Indeed, thinking of his ordinary unsusceptibility to such things, he told himself sharply that he was adding an affectation of discomfort to the others that he had to bear; and that if Madeline had not given him the idea it would never have entered his mind. The less, he mused, that one had to do with finicking feelings in this world the better. They were well enough for people who were tolerably conditioned in essentials—he preferred this vagueness, even with himself, in connection with his marriage—otherwise they added pricks. Besides he had that other matter to think of.

He thought of the other matter with such obvious irritation that the butler coming in to say that the 'English water' was finished, and how many dozen should he order, put a chair in its place instead, closed the door softly again, and went away. It was not good for the dignity of butlers to ask questions of any sort with a look of that kind under the eyebrows of the sahib. The matter was not serious, Colonel Innes told himself, but he would prefer by comparison to deal with matters that were serious. He knew Simla well enough to attach no overwhelming importance to things said about women at the Club, where the broadest charity prevailed underneath, and the idle comment of the moment had an intrinsic value as a distraction rather than a reflective one as a criticism. This consideration, however, was more philosophical in connection with other men's wives. He found very little in it to palliate what he had overheard, submerged in the 'Times of India', that afternoon. And to put an edge on it, the thing had been said by one of his own juniors. Luckily the boy had left the room without discovering who was behind the 'Times of India'. Innes felt that he should be grateful for having been spared the exigency of defending his wife against a flippant word to which she had very probably laid herself open. He was very angry, and it is perhaps not surprising that he did not pause to consider how far his anger was due to the humiliating necessity of speaking to her about it. She was coming at last though; she was in the hall. He would get it over quickly.

'Goodbye!' said Mrs. Innes at the door. 'No, I can't possibly let you come in to tea. I don't know how you have the conscience after drinking three cups at Mrs. Mickie's, where I had no business to take you! Tomorrow? Oh, all right if you want to VERY badly. But I won't promise you strawberries—they're nearly all gone.'

There was the sound of a departing pony's trot, and Mrs. Innes came into the drawing-room.

'Good heavens, Horace! what are you sitting there for like a—like a ghost? Why didn't you make a noise or something, and why aren't you at office? I can't tell you how you startled me.'

'It is early,' Colonel Innes said. 'We are neither of us in the house, as a rule, at this hour.'

'Coincidence!' Violet turned a cool, searching glance on her husband, and held herself ready. 'I came home early because I want to alter the lace on my yellow bodice for tonight. It's too disgusting as it is. But I was rather glad to get away from Mrs. Mickie's lot. So rowdy!'

'And I came because I had a special reason for wanting to speak to you.'

Mrs. Violet's lips parted, and her breath, in spite of herself, came a little faster.

'As we are dining out tonight, I thought that if I didn't catch you now I might not have another opportunity—till tomorrow morning.'

'And it's always a pity to spoil one's breakfast. I can tell from your manner, mon ami, it's something disagreeable. What have I been and gone and done?'

She was dancing, poor thing, in her little vulgar way, on hot iron. But her eyes kept their inconsistent coolness.

'I heard something today which you are not in the way of hearing. You have—probably—no conception that it could be said.'

'Then she has been telling other people. ABSOLUTELY the worst thing she could do!' Mrs. Innes exclaimed privately, sitting unmoved, her face a little too expectant.

'You won't be prepared for it—you may be shocked and hurt by it. Indeed, I think there is no need to repeat it to you. But I must put you on your guard. Men are coarser, you know, than women; they are apt to put their own interpretation—'

'What is it?'

There was a physical gasp, a sharpness in her voice that brought Innes's eyes from the floor to her face.

'I am sorry,' he said, 'but—don't overestimate it, don't let it worry you. It was simply a very impertinent—a very disagreeable reference to you and Mr. Holmcroft, I think, in connection with the Dovedell's picnic. It was a particularly silly thing as well, and I am sure no one would attach any importance to it, but it was said openly at the Club, and—'

'Who said it?' Mrs. Innes demanded.

A flood of colour rushed over her face. Horace marked that she blushed.

'I don't know whether I ought to tell you, Violet. It certainly was not meant for your ears.'

'If I'm not to know who said it, I don't see why I should pay any attention to it. Mere idle rumour—'

Innes bit his lip.

'Captain Gordon said it,' he replied.

'Bobby Gordon! DO tell me what he said! I'm dying to know. Was he very disagreeable? I DID give his dance away on Thursday night.'

Innes looked at her with the curious distrust which she often inspired in him. He had a feeling that he would like to put her out of the room into a place by herself, and keep her there.

'I won't repeat what he said.' Colonel Innes took up the 'Saturday Review'.

'Oh, do, Horace! I particularly want to know.'

Innes said nothing.

'Horace! Was it—was it anything about Mr. Holmcroft being my Secretariat baa-lamb?'

'If you adorn your guess with a little profanity,' said Innes, acidly, 'you won't be far wrong.'

Mrs. Violet burst into a peal of laughter.

'Why, you old goose!' she articulated, behind her handkerchief; 'he said that to ME.'

Innes laid down the 'Saturday Review'.

'To you!' he repeated; 'Gordon said it to you!'

'Rather!' Mrs. Violet was still mirthful. 'I'm not sure that he didn't call poor little Homie something worse than that. It's the purest jealousy on his part—nothing to make a fuss about.'

The fourth skin which enables so many of us to be callous to all but the relative meaning of careless phrases had not been given to Innes, and her words fell upon his bare sense of propriety.

'Jealous,' he said, 'of a married woman? I find that difficult to understand.'

Violet's face straightened out.

'Don't be absurd, Horace. These boys are always jealous of somebody or other—it's the occupation of their lives! I really don't see how one can prevent it.'

'It seems to me that a self-respecting woman should see how. Your point of view in these matters is incomprehensible.'

'Perhaps,' Violet was driven by righteous anger to say, 'you find Miss Anderson's easier to understand.'

Colonel Innes's face took its regimental disciplinary look, and, though his eyes were aroused, his words were quiet with repression.

'I see no reason to discuss Miss Anderson with you,' he said. 'She has nothing to do with what we are talking about.'

'Oh, don't you, really! Hasn't she, indeed! I take it you are trying to make me believe that compromising things are said about Mr. Holmcroft and me at the Club. Well, I advise you to keep your ears open a little more, and listen to the things said about you and Madeline Anderson there. But I don't suppose you would be in such a hurry to repeat them to HER.'

Innes turned very white, and the rigidity of his face gave place to heavy dismay. His look was that of a man upon whom misfortune had fallen out of a clear sky. For an instant he stared at his wife. When he spoke his voice was altered.

'For God's sake!' he said, 'let us have done with this pitiful wrangling. I dare say you can take care of yourself; at all events, I only meant to warn you. But now you must tell me exactly what you mean by this that you have said—this—about—'

'The fat's in the fire,' was Mrs. Innes's reflection.

'Certainly, I'll tell you—'

'Don't shout, please!'

'I mean simply that all Simla is talking about your affair with Miss Anderson. You may imagine that because you are fifteen years older than she is things won't be thought of, but they are, and I hear it's been spoken about at Viceregal Lodge. I KNOW Lady Bloomfield has noticed it, for she herself mentioned it to me. I told her I hadn't the slightest objection, and neither have I, but there's an old proverb about people in glass houses. What are you going to do?'

Colonel Innes's expression was certainly alarming, and he had made a step toward her that had menace in it.

'I am going out,' he said, and turned and left her to her triumph.



Chapter 3.IX.

She—Violet—had unspeakably vulgarized it, but it must be true—it must be, to some extent, true. She may even have lied about it, but the truth was there, fundamentally, in the mere fact that it had been suggested to her imagination. Madeline's name, which had come to be for him an epitome of what was finest and most valuable, most to be lived for, was dropping from men's lips into a kind of an abyss of dishonourable suggestion. There was no way out of it or around it. It was a cloud which encompassed them, suddenly blackening down.

There was nothing that he could do—nothing. Except, yes, of course—that was obvious, as obvious as any other plain duty. Through his selfishness it had a beginning; in spite of his selfishness it should have an end. That went without saying. No more walks or rides. In a conventional way, perhaps—but nothing deliberate, designed—and never alone together. Gossip about flippant married women was bad enough, but that it should concern itself with an unprotected creature like Madeline was monstrous, incredible. He strode fiercely into the road round Jakko, and no little harmless snake, if it had crawled across his path, would have failed to suffer a quick fate under the guidance of his imagination. But there was nothing for him to kill, and he turned upon himself.

The sun went down into the Punjab and left great blue-and-purple hill worlds barring the passage behind him. The deodars sank waist deep into filmy shadow, and the yellow afterlight lay silently among the branches. A pink-haunched monkey lopading across the road with a great show of prudence seemed to have strayed into an unfamiliar country, and the rustling twigs behind him made an episode of sound. The road in perpetual curve between its little stone parapet and the broad flank of the hill rose and fell under the deodars; Innes took its slopes and its steepnesses with even, unslackened stride, aware of no difference, aware of little indeed except the physical necessity of movement, spurred on by a futile instinct that the end of his walk would be the end of his trouble—his amazing, black, menacing trouble. A pony's trot behind him struck through the silence like percussion-caps; all Jakko seemed to echo with it; and it came nearer—insistent, purposeful—but he was hardly aware of it until the creature pulled up beside him, and Madeline, slipping quickly off, said—

'I'm coming too.'

He took off his hat and stared at her. She seemed to represent a climax.

'I'm coming too,' she said. 'I'm tired of picking flies off the Turk, and he's really unbearable about them tonight. Here, syce.' She threw the reins to the man and turned to Innes with a smile of relief. 'I would much rather do a walk. Why—you want me to come too, don't you?'

His face was all one negative, and under the unexpectedness of it and the amazement of it her questioning eyes slowly filled with sudden, uncontrollable tears, so that she had to lower them, and look steadily at the hoof-marks in the road while she waited for his answer.

'You know how I feel about seeing you—how glad I always am,' he stammered. 'But there are reasons—'

'Reasons?' she repeated, half audibly.

'I don't know how to tell you. I will write. But let me put you up again—'

'I will not,' Madeline said, with a sob, 'I won't be sent home like a child. I am going to walk, but—but I can quite well go alone.' She started forward, and her foot caught in her habit so that she made an awkward stumble and came down on her knee. In rising she stumbled again, and his quick arm was necessary. Looking down at her, he saw that she was crying bitterly. The tension had lasted long, and the snap had come when she least expected it.

'Stop,' Innes said, firmly, hardly daring to turn his head and ascertain the blessed fact that they were still alone. 'Stop instantly. You shall not go by yourself.' He flicked the dust off her habit with his pocket-handkerchief. 'Come, please; we will go on together.' Her distress seemed to make things simple again. It was as if the cloud that hung over them had melted as she wept, and lifted, and drifted a little further on. For the moment, naturally, nothing mattered except that she should be comforted. As she walked by his side shaken with her effort at self-control, he had to resist the impulse to touch her. His hand tingled to do its part in soothing her, his arm ached to protect her, while he vaguely felt an element of right, of justice, in her tears; they were in a manner his own. What he did was to turn and ask the syce following if he had loosened the Turk's saddle-girths.

'I shall be better—in a moment,' Madeline said, and he answered, 'Of course'; but they walked on and said nothing more until the road ran out from under the last deodar and round the first bare boulder that marked the beginning of the Ladies' Mile. It lay rolled out before them, the Ladies' Mile, sinuous and grey and empty, along the face of the cliff; they could see from one end of it to the other. It was the bleak side of Jakko; even tonight there was a fresh springing coldness in it blowing over from the hidden snows behind the rims of the nearer hills. Madeline held up her face to it, and gave herself a moment of its grateful discipline.

'I have been as foolish as possible,' she said, 'as foolish as possible. I have distressed you. Well, I couldn't help it—that is all there is to be said. Now if you will tell me—what is in your mind—what you spoke of writing—I will mount again and go home. It doesn't matter—I know you didn't mean to be unkind.' Her lip was trembling again, and he knew it, and dared not look at it.

'How can you ask me to tell you—miserable things!' he exclaimed. 'How can I find the words? And I have only just been told—I can hardly myself conceive it—'

'I am not a child in her teens that my ears should be guarded from miserable things. I have come of age, I have entered into my inheritance of the world's bitterness with the rest. I can listen,' Madeline said. 'Why not?'

He looked to her with grave tenderness. 'You think yourself very old, and very wise about the world,' he said; 'but you are a woman, and you will be hurt. And when I think that a little ordinary forethought on my part would have protected you, I feel like the criminal I am.'

'Don't make too much of it,' she said, simply. 'I have a presentiment—'

'I'll tell you,' Innes said, slowly; 'I won't niggle about it. The people of this place—idiots!—are unable to believe that a man and a woman can be to each other what we are.'

'Yes?' said Madeline. She paused beside the parapet and looked down at the indistinct little fields below, and the blurred masses of white wild roses waving midway against the precipice.

'They can not understand that there can be any higher plane of intercourse between us than the one they know. They won't see—they can't see—that the satisfaction we find in being together is of a different nature.'

'I see,' said Madeline. She had raised her eyes, and they sought the solemn lines of the horizon. She looked as if she saw something infinitely lifted above the pettiness he retailed to her.

'So they say—good God, why should I tell you what they say!' It suddenly flashed upon him that the embodiment of it in words would be at once, from him, sacrilegious and ludicrous. It flashed upon him that her natural anger would bring him pain, and that if she laughed—it was so hard to tell when she would laugh—it would be as if she struck him. He cast about him dumb and helpless while she kept her invincibly quiet gaze upon the farther hills. She was thinking that this breath of gossip, now that it had blown, was a very slight affair compared with Horace Innes's misery—which he did not seem to understand. Then her soul rose up in her, brushing everything aside, and forgetting, alas! the vow it had once made to her.

'I think I know,' she said. 'They are indeed foolish. They say that we—love each other. Is not that what they say?'

He looked in amazement into her tender eyes and caught at the little mocking smile about her lips. Suddenly the world grew light about him, the shadows fled away. Somewhere down in the valley, he remembered afterward, a hill-flute made music. When he spoke it was almost in a whisper, lest he should disturb some newly perceived lovely thing that had wings, and might leave him. 'Oh, Madeline,' he said, 'is it true?' She only smiled on in gladness that took no heed of any apprehension, any fear or scruple, and he himself keeping his eyes upon her face, said, 'It is true.'

So they stood for a little time in silence while she resisted her great opportunity. She resisted it to the end, and presently beckoned to the syce, who came up leading the pony. Innes mounted her mechanically and said, 'Is that all right?' as she put her foot in the stirrup, without knowing that he had spoken.

'Goodbye,' she said; 'I am going away—immediately. It will be better. And listen—I have known this for weeks—and I have gone on seeing you. And I hope I am not any more wicked than I feel. Goodbye.'

'Goodbye,' he said, taking his hand from the pony's neck, and she rode buoyantly away. He, turning to breast the road again, saw darkness gathering over the end of it, and drawing nearer.

At eleven o'clock next morning Brookes rose from her packing to take a note addressed to her mistress from the hand of a messenger in the Imperial red and gold. It ran:

'Dear Miss Anderson—I write to tell you that I have obtained three weeks' leave, and I am going into the interior to shoot, starting this afternoon. You spoke yesterday of leaving Simla almost immediately. I trust you will not do this, as it would be extremely risky to venture down to the Plains just now. In ten days the rains will have broken, when it will be safe. Pray wait till then.

'Yours sincerely,

'Horace Innes.'

Involuntarily the letter found its way to Madeline's lips, and remained there until she saw the maid observing her with intelligence.

'Brookes,' she said, 'I am strongly advised not to start until the rains break. I think, on the whole, that we won't.'

'Indeed, miss,' returned Brookes, 'Mrs. Sergeant Simmons told me that it was courting cholera to go—and nothing short of it. I must say I'm thankful.'



Chapter 3.X.

A week later Colonel Innes had got his leave, and had left Simla for the snow-line by what is facetiously known as 'the carriage road to Tibet.' Madeline had done as she was bidden, and was waiting for the rains to break. Another day had come without them. To write and tell Innes, to write to tell Violet, to go away and leave the situation as she found it; she had lived and moved and slept and awakened to these alternatives. At the moment she slept.

It was early, very early in the morning. The hills all about seemed still unaware of it, standing in the greyness, compact, silent, immutable, as if they slept with their eyes open. Nothing spoke of the oncoming sun, nothing was yet surprised. The hill world lifted itself unconscious in a pale solution of daylight, and only on the sky-line, very far away, it rippled into a cloud. The flimsy town clinging steeply roof above roof to the slope, mounting to the saddle and slipping over on the other side, cut the dawn with innumerable little lines and angles all in one tone like a pencil drawing.

There was no feeling in it, no expression. It had a temporary air in that light, like trampled snow, and even the big Secretariat buildings that raised themselves here and there out of the huddling bazaar looked trivial, childish enterprises in the simple revelation of the morning. A cold silence was abroad, which a crow now and then vainly tried to disturb with a note of tentative enterprise, forced, premature. It announced that the sun would probably rise, but nothing more. In the little dark shops of the wood-carvers an occasional indefinite figure moved, groping among last night's tools, or an old woman in a red sari washed a brass dish over the shallow open drain that ran past her door. At the tonga terminus, below the Mall, a couple of coughing syces, muffled in their blankets, pulled one of these vehicles out of the shed. They pushed it about sleepily, with clumsy futility; nothing else stirred or spoke at all in Simla. Nothing disturbed Miss Anderson asleep in her hotel.

A brown figure in a loin-cloth, with a burden, appeared where the road turned down from the Mall, and then another, and several following. They were coolies, and they carried luggage.

The first to arrive beside the tonga bent and loosed the trunk he brought, which slipped from his back to the ground. The syces looked at him, saying nothing, and he straightened himself against the wall of the hillside, also in silence. It was too early for conversation. Thus did all the others.

When the last portmanteau had been deposited, a khaki-coloured heap on the shed floor rose up as a broad-shouldered Punjabi driver, and walked round the luggage, looking at it.

'And you, owls' brethren,' he said, with sarcasm, addressing the first coolie, 'you have undertaken to carry these matter fifty-eight kos to Kalka, have you?'

'Na,' replied the coolie, stolidly, and spat.

'How else, then, is it to be taken?' the driver cried, with anger in his argument. 'Behold the memsahib has ordered but one tonga, and a fool-thing of an ekka. Here is work for six tongas! What reason is there in this?'

The coolie folded his naked arms, and dug in the dust with an unconcerned toe.

'I, what can I do?' he said, 'It is the order of the memsahib.'

Ram Singh grunted and said no more. A rickshaw was coming down from the Mall, and the memsahib was in it.

Ten minutes later the ponies stood in their traces under the iron bar, and the lady sat in the tonga behind Ram Singh. Her runners, in uniform, waited beside the empty rickshaw with a puzzled look, at which she laughed, and threw a rupee to the head man.

The luggage was piled and corded on three ekkas behind, and their cross-legged drivers, too, were ready.

'Chellao!' she cried, crisply, and Ram Singh imperturbably lifted the reins. The little procession clanked and jingled along the hillside, always tending down, and broke upon the early grey melancholy with a forced and futile cheerfulness, too early, like everything else. As it passed the last of Simla's little gardens, spread like a pocket-handkerchief on the side of the hill, the lady leaned forward and looked back as if she wished to impress the place upon her memory. Her expression was that of a person going forth without demur into the day's hazards, ready to cope with them, yet there was some regret in the backward look.

'It's a place,' she said aloud, 'where EVERYBODY has a good time!'

Then the Amusement Club went out of sight behind a curve; and she settled herself more comfortably among her cushions, and drew a wrap round her to meet the chill wind of the valley. It was all behind her. The lady looked out as the ponies galloped up to the first changing-place, and, seeing a saddled horse held by a syce, cramped herself a little into one corner to make room. The seat would just hold two.

Ram Singh salaamed, getting down to harness the fresh pair, and a man put his face in at the side of the tonga and took off his hat.

'Are you all right?' he said. His smile was as conscious as his words were casual.

'Quite right. The ayah was silly about coming—didn't want to leave her babies or something—so I had to leave her behind. Everything else is either here or in the ekkas.'

'The brute! Never mind—they're not much use in a railway journey. You can pick up another at Bombay. Then I suppose I'd better get in.'

'I suppose you better had. Unless you think of walking,' she laughed, and he took the place beside her.

Ram Singh again unquestioningly took up the reins.

'Nobody else going down?'

'Not another soul. We might just as well have started together.'

'Oh, well, we couldn't tell. Beastly awkward if there had been anybody.'

'Yes,' she said, but thrust up her under lip indifferently.

Then, with the effect of turning to the business in hand, she bent her eyes upon him understandingly and smiled in frank reference to something that had not been mentioned. 'It's goodbye Simla, isn't it?' she said. He smiled in response and put his hand upon her firm, round arm, possessively, and they began to talk.

Ram Singh, all unaware, kept his horses at their steady clanking downward gallop, and Simla, clinging to the hilltops, was brushed by the first rays of the sun.

It came a gloriously clear morning; early riders round Jakko saw the real India lying beyond the outer ranges, flat and blue and pictured with forests and rivers like a map. The plains were pretty and interesting in this aspect, but nobody found them attractive. Sensitive people liked it better when the heat mist veiled them and it was possible to look abroad without a sudden painful thought of contrasting temperatures. We may suppose that the inhabitants of Paradise sometimes grieve over their luck. Even Madeline Anderson, whose heart knew no constriction at the remembrance of brother or husband at some cruel point in the blue expanse, had come to turn her head more willingly the other way, towards the hills rolling up to the snows, being a woman who suffered by proxy, and by observation, and by Rudyard Kipling.

On this particular morning, however, she had not elected to do either. She slept late instead, and was glad to sleep. I might as well say at once that on the night before she had made up her mind, had brought herself to the point, and had written to Mrs. Innes, at 'Two Gables', all the facts, in so far as she was acquainted with them, connected with Frederick Prendergast's death. She was very much ashamed of herself, poor girl; she was aware that, through her postponement, Horace Innes would now see his problem in all its bitterness, make his choice with his eyes wide open. If it had only happened before he knew—anything about her!

She charged herself with having deliberately waited, and then spent an exhausting hour trying to believe that she had drifted unconsciously to the point of their mutual confession. Whatever the truth was, she did not hesitate to recognize a new voice in her private counsels from that hour, urging her in one way or another to bring matters to an end. It was a strong instinct; looking at the facts, she saw it was the gambler's. When she tried to think of the ethical considerations involved she saw only the chances. The air seemed to throb with them all night; she had to count them finally to get rid of them.

Brookes was up betimes, however, and sent off the letter. It went duly, by Surnoo, to Mrs. Innes at 'Two Gables'. Madeline woke at seven with a start, and asked if it had gone, then slept again contentedly. So far as she was concerned the thing was finished. The breakfast gong had sounded, and the English mail had arrived before she opened her eyes again upon the day's issues; she gave it her somewhat desultory attention while Brookes did her hair. There was only one scrap of news. Adele mentioned in a postscript that poor Mr. Prendergast's money was likely to go to a distant relative, it having transpired that he died without leaving a will.

'She is sure, absolutely sure,' Madeline mused, 'to answer my letter in person. She will be here within an hour. I shall have this to tell her, too. How pleased she will be! She will come into it all, I suppose—if she is allowed. Though she won't be allowed, that is if—' But there speculation began, and Madeline had forbidden herself speculation, if not once and for all, at least many times and for fifteen minutes.

No reasonable purpose would be served by Mrs. Innes's visit, Madeline reflected, as she sat waiting in the little room opening on the veranda; but she would come, of course she would come. She would require the satisfaction of the verbal assurance; she would hope to extract more details; she would want the objectionable gratification of talking if over.

In spite of any assurance, she would believe that Madeline had not told her before in order to make her miserable a little longer than she need be; but, after all, her impression about that did not particularly matter. It couldn't possibly be a pleasant interview, yet Madeline found herself impatient for it.

'Surnoo,' she said of her messenger, 'must be idling on his way back in the bazaar. I must try to remember to fine him two pice. Surnoo is incorrigible.'

She forgot, however, to fine Surnoo. The pad of his bare feet sounded along the veranda almost immediately, and the look in his Pahari eyes was that of expected reproach, and ability to defend himself against it.

He held out two letters at arm's-length, for as he was expected to bring only one there was a fault in this; and all his domestic traditions told him that he might be chastened. One was addressed to Madeline in Mrs. Innes's handwriting; the other, she saw with astonishment, was her own communication to that lady, her own letter returned. Surnoo explained volubly all the way along the veranda, and in the flood of his unknown tongue Madeline caught a sentence or two.

'The memsahib was not,' said Surnoo. Clearly he could not deliver a letter to a memsahib who was not. 'Therefore,' Surnoo continued, 'I have brought back your honour's letter, and the other I had from the hand of the memsahib's runner, the runner with one eye, who was on the road to bring it here. More I do not know, but it appears that the memsahib has gone to her father and mother in Belaat, being very sorrowful because the Colonel-sahib has left her to shoot.'

'The letter will tell me,' said Madeline to herself, fingering it. 'Enough, Surnoo.'

The man went away, and Madeline closed and locked the door of her sitting-room. The letter would tell her—what? She glanced about her with dissatisfaction, and sought the greater privacy of her bedroom, where also she locked the door and drew the muslin curtain across the window. She laid the letter on the dressing-table and kept her eyes upon it while she unfastened, with trembling hands, the brooch at her neck and the belt at her waist. She did one or two other meaningless things, as if she wanted to gain time, to fortify her nerves even against an exhibition before herself.

Then she sat down with her back towards the light and opened the letter. It had a pink look and a scented air. Even in her beating suspense Madeline held it a little farther away from her, as she unfolded it, and it ran:

'Dear Miss Anderson—What will you say, I wonder, and what will Simla say, when you know that Captain Drake and I have determined to DISREGARD CONVENTIONALITIES, and live henceforward only for one another! I am all packed up, and long before this meets your eye we shall have taken the step which society condemns, but which I have a feeling that you, knowing my storm-tossed history, will be broad-minded enough to sympathize with, at least to some extent. That is the reason I am writing to you rather than to any of my own chums, and also of course to have the satisfaction of telling you that I no longer care what you do about letting out the secret of my marriage to Frederick Prendergast. I am now ABOVE AND BEYOND IT. Any way you look at it, I do not see that I am much to blame. As I never have been Colonel Innes's wife there can be no harm in leaving him, though if he had ever been sympathetic, or understood me the LEAST LITTLE BIT, I might have felt bound to him. But he has never been able to evoke the finer parts of my nature, and when this is the case marriage is a mere miserable fleshly failure. You may say, "Why try it a third time?"—but my union with Val will be different. I have never been fond of the opposite sex—so far as that goes I should have made a very good nun—but for a long time Valentine Drake has been the only man I cared to have come within a mile of me, and lately we have discovered that we are absolutely necessary to each other's existence on the higher plane. I don't care much what Simla thinks, but if you happen to be talking about it to dear Lady Bloomfield, you might just mention this. Val has eight hundred a year of his own, so it is perfectly practicable. Of course, he will send in his papers. WHATEVER HAPPENS, Val and I will never bind ourselves in any way. We both think it wrong and enslaving. I have nothing more to add, except that I am depending on you to explain to Simla that I never was Mrs. Innes.

'Yours sincerely,

'Violet Prendergast.

'P.S.—I have written to Horace, telling him everything about everything, and sent my letter off to him in the wilds by a runner. If you see him you might try and smooth him down. I don't want him coming after Val with a revolver.'

Madeline read this communication through twice. Then quietly and deliberately she lay down upon the bed, and drew herself out of the control of her heart by the hard labour of thought. When she rose, she had decided that there were only two things for her to do, and she began at once to do them, continuing her refuge in action. She threw her little rooms open again, and walked methodically round the outer one, collecting the odds and ends of Indian fabrics with which she had garnished it.

As the maid came in, she looked up from folding them.

'I have news, Brookes,' she said, 'that necessitates my going home at once. No, it is not bad news, but—important. I will go now and see about the tonga. We must start tomorrow morning.'

Brookes called Surnoo, and the rickshaw came round.

Madeline looked at her watch.

'The telegraph office,' she said; 'and as quickly as may be.'

As the runners panted over the Mall, up and down and on, Madeline said to herself, 'She shall have her chance. She shall choose.'

The four reeking Paharis pulled up at the telegraph office, and Madeline sped up the steps. There was a table, with forms printed 'Indian Telegraphs,' and the usual bottle of thickened ink and pair of rusty pens. She sat down to her intention as if she dared not let it cool; she wrote her message swiftly, she had worded it on the way.

'To Mrs. Innes, Dak Bungalow, Solon.

'From M. Anderson, Simla.

'Frederick Prendergast died on January 7th, at Sing Sing. Your letter considered confidential if you return. Prendergast left no will.

'M. Anderson.'

'Send this "urgent," Babu,' she said to the clerk, 'and repeat it to the railway station, Kalka. Shall I fill up another form? No? Very well.'

At the door she turned and came back.

'It is now eleven o'clock,' she said. 'The person I am telegraphing to is on her way down to get tonight's train at Kalka. I am hoping to catch her half-way at Solon. Do you think I can?'

'I think so, madam. Oyess! It is the custom to stop at Solon for tiffin. The telegram can arrive there. All urgent telegram going very quick.'

'And in any case,' said Madeline, 'it can not fail to reach her at Kalka?'

'Not possible to fail, madam.'

'She will have her chance,' she said to herself, on her way to the post office to order her tonga. And with a little nauseated shudder at the thought of the letter in her pocket, she added, 'It is amazing. I should have thought her too good a woman of business!' After which she concentrated her whole attention upon the necessities of departure. Her single immediate apprehension was that Horace Innes might, by some magic of circumstances, be transported back into Simla before she could get out of it. That such a contingency was physically impossible made no difference to her nerves, and to the last Brookes was the hurrying victim of unnecessary promptings.

The little rambling hotel of Kalka, where the railway spreads out over the plains, raises its white-washed shelter under the very walls of the Himalayas. Madeline, just arrived, lay back in a long wicker chair on the veranda, and looked up at them as they mounted green and grey and silent under the beating of the first of the rains. Everywhere was a luxury of silence, the place was steeped in it, drowned in it. A feeding cow flicked an automatic tail under a tree. Near the low mud wall that strolled irresolutely between the house and the hills leaned a bush with a few single pink roses; their petals were floating down under the battering drops. A draggled bee tried to climb to a dry place on a pillar of the veranda. Above all, the hills, immediate, towering, all grey and green, solidly ideal, with phantasies of mist. Everything drippingly soft and silent. Suddenly the venetian blind that hung before the door of a bedroom farther on swayed out before a hand variously ringed to emit a lady in a pink lawn dress with apt embroideries. Madeline's half-closed eyes opened very wide, and for an instant she and the lady, to whom I must once more refer as Mrs. Innes, confronted each other. Then Mrs. Innes's countenance expanded, and she took three or four light steps forward.

'Oh, you dear thing!' she exclaimed. 'I thought you were in Simla! Imagine you being here! Do you know you have SAVED me!'

Madeline regarded her in silence, while a pallor spread over her face and lips, and her features grew sharp with a presage of pain.

'Have I?' she stammered. She could not think.

'Indeed you have. I don't know how to be grateful enough to you. Your telegram of yesterday reached me at Solon. We had just sat down to tiffin. Nothing will ever shake my faith in providence again! My dear, THINK of it—after all I've been through, my darling Val—and one hundred thousand pounds!'

'Well?'

'Well—I stayed behind there last night, and Val came on here and made the necessary arrangement, and—'

'Yes?'

'And we were married this morning. Good heavens! What's the matter with you! Here—oh, Brookes! Water, salts—anything!'

Brookes, I know, would think that I should dwell at greater length upon Miss Anderson's attack of faintness in Kalka, and the various measures which were resorted to for her succour, but perhaps the feelings and expedients of any really capable lady's-maid under the circumstances may be taken for granted. I feel more seriously called upon to explain that Colonel Horace Innes, shortly after these last events, took two years' furlough to England, during which he made a very interesting tour in the United States with the lady with now bears his name by inalienable right. Captain and Mrs. Valentine Drake are getting the most that is to be had out of Frederick Prendergast's fortune with courage in London and the European capitals, where Mrs. Drake is sometimes mentioned as a lady with a romantic past. They have not returned to Simla, where the situation has never been properly understood. People always supposed that Mrs. Drake ran away that June morning with her present husband, who must have been tremendously fond of her to have married her 'after the divorce.' She is also occasionally mentioned in undertones as 'the first Mrs. Innes.' All of which we know to be quite erroneous, like most scandal.

Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge, in retirement, are superintending the education of their children in Bedford, where it is cheap and practical. They converse when they meet about the iniquitous prices of dressmakers and the degeneracy of the kind of cook obtainable in England at eighteen pounds a year. Mrs. Gammidge has grown rather portly and very ritualistic. They seldom speak of Simla, and when they do, if too reminiscent a spark appears in Mrs. Mickie's eye, Mrs. Gammidge changes the subject. Kitty Vesey still fills her dance cards at Viceregal functions, though people do not quote her as they used to, and subalterns imagine themselves vastly witty about her colour, which is unimpaired. People often commend her, however, for her good nature to debutantes, and it is admitted that she may still ride with credit in 'affinity stakes'—and occasionally win them.



4. The Pool in the Desert.

I knew Anna Chichele and Judy Harbottle so well, and they figured so vividly at one time against the rather empty landscape of life in a frontier station, that my affection for one of them used to seem little more, or less, than a variant upon my affection for the other. That recollection, however, bears examination badly; Judy was much the better sort, and it is Judy's part in it that draws me into telling the story. Conveying Judy is what I tremble at: her part was simple. Looking back—and not so very far—her part has the relief of high comedy with the proximity of tears; but looking closely, I find that it is mostly Judy, and what she did is entirely second, in my untarnished picture, to what she was. Still I do not think I can dissuade myself from putting it down.

They would, of course, inevitably have found each other sooner or later, Mrs. Harbottle and Mrs. Chichele, but it was I who actually introduced them; my palmy veranda in Rawul Pindi; where the teacups used to assemble, was the scene of it. I presided behind my samovar over the early formalities that were almost at once to drop from their friendship, like the sheath of some bursting flower. I deliberately brought them together, so the birth was not accidental, and my interest in it quite legitimately maternal. We always had tea in the veranda in Rawul Pindi, the drawing-room was painted blue, blue for thirty feet up to the whitewashed cotton ceiling; nothing of any value in the way of a human relation, I am sure, could have originated there. The veranda was spacious and open, their mutual observation had room and freedom; I watched it to and fro. I had not long to wait for my reward; the beautiful candour I expected between them was not ten minutes in coming. For the sake of it I had taken some trouble, but when I perceived it revealing I went and sat down beside Judy's husband, Robert Harbottle, and talked about Pharaoh's split hoof. It was only fair; and when next day I got their impressions of one another, I felt single-minded and deserving.

I knew it would be a satisfactory sort of thing to do, but perhaps it was rather more for Judy's sake than for Anna's that I did it. Mrs. Harbottle was only twenty-seven then and Robert a major, but he had brought her to India out of an episode too colour-flushed to tone with English hedges; their marriage had come, in short, of his divorce, and as too natural a consequence. In India it is well known that the eye becomes accustomed to primitive pigments and high lights; the aesthetic consideration, if nothing else, demanded Robert's exchange. He was lucky to get a Piffer regiment, and the Twelfth were lucky to get him; we were all lucky, I thought, to get Judy. It was an opinion, of course, a good deal challenged, even in Rawul Pindi, where it was thought, especially in the beginning, that acquiescence was the most the Harbottles could hope for. That is not enough in India; cordiality is the common right. I could not have Judy preserving her atmosphere at our tea-parties and gymkhanas. Not that there were two minds among us about 'the case'; it was a preposterous case, sentimentally undignified, from some points of view deplorable. I chose to reserve my point of view, from which I saw it, on Judy's behalf, merely quixotic, preferring on Robert's just to close my eyes. There is no doubt that his first wife was odious to a degree which it is simply pleasanter not to recount, but her malignity must almost have amounted to a sense of humour. Her detestation of her cousin Judy Thynne dated much further back than Robert's attachment. That began in Paris, where Judy, a young widow, was developing a real vein at Julian's. I am entirely convinced that there was nothing, as people say, 'in it,' Judy had not a thought at that time that was not based on Chinese white and permeated with good-fellowship; but there was a good deal of it, and no doubt the turgid imagination of the first Mrs. Harbottle dealt with it honestly enough. At all events, she saw her opportunity, and the depths of her indifference to Robert bubbled up venomously into the suit. That it was undefended was the senseless mystery; decency ordained that he and Judy should have made a fight, even in the hope that it would be a losing one. The reason it had to be a losing one—the reason so immensely criticized—was that the petitioning lady obstinately refused to bring her action against any other set of circumstances than those to which, I have no doubt, Judy contributed every indiscretion. It is hard to imagine Robert Harbottle refusing her any sort of justification that the law demands short of beating her, but her malice would accept nothing of which the account did not go for final settlement to Judy Thynne. If her husband wanted his liberty, he should have it, she declared, at that price and no other. Major Harbottle did indeed deeply long for his liberty, and his interesting friend, Mrs. Thynne, had, one can only say, the most vivid commiseration for his bondage. Whatever chance they had of winning, to win would be, for the end they had at heart, to lose, so they simply abstained, as it were, from comment upon the detestable procedure which terminated in the rule absolute. I have often wondered whether the whole business would not have been more defensible if there had been on Judy's part any emotional spring for the leap they made. I offer my conviction that there was none, that she was only extravagantly affected by the ideals of the Quarter—it is a transporting atmosphere—and held a view of comradeship which permitted the reversal of the modern situation filled by a blameless correspondent. Robert, of course, was tremendously in love with her; but my theory is that she married him as the logical outcome of her sacrifice and by no means the smallest part of it.

It was all quite unimaginable, as so many things are, but the upshot of it brought Judy to Rawul Pindi, as I have said, where I for one thought her mistake insignificant compared with her value. It would have been great, her value, anywhere; in the middle of the Punjab it was incalculable. To explain why would be to explain British India, but I hope it will appear; and I am quite willing, remember, to take the responsibility if it does not.

Somers Chichele, Anna's son, it is absurd to think, must have been about fifteen then, reflecting at Winchester with the other 'men' upon the comparative merits of tinned sardines and jam roll, and whether a packet of real Egyptians was not worth the sacrifice of either. His father was colonel of the Twelfth; his mother was still charming. It was the year before Dick Forsyth came down from the neighbourhood of Sheikhbudin with a brevet and a good deal of personal damage. I mention him because he proved Anna's charm in the only conclusive way before the eyes of us all; and the station, I remember, was edified to observe that if Mrs. Chichele came out of the matter 'straight'—one relapses so easily into the simple definitions of those parts—which she undoubtedly did, she owed it in no small degree to Judy Harbottle. This one feels to be hardly a legitimate reference, but it is something tangible to lay hold upon in trying to describe the web of volitions which began to weave itself between the two that afternoon on my veranda and which afterward became so strong a bond. I was delighted with the thing; its simplicity and sincerity stood out among our conventional little compromises at friendship like an ideal. She and Judy had the assurance of one another; they made upon one another the finest and often the most unconscionable demands. One met them walking at odd hours in queer places, of which I imagine they were not much aware. They would turn deliberately off the Maidan and away from the bandstand to be rid of our irrelevant bows; they did their duty by the rest of us, but the most egregious among us, the Deputy-Commissioner for selection, could see that he hardly counted. I thought I understood, but that may have been my fatuity; certainly when their husbands inquired what on earth they had been talking of, it usually transpired that they had found an infinite amount to say about nothing. It was a little worrying to hear Colonel Chichele and Major Harbottle describe their wives as 'pals,' but the fact could not be denied, and after all we were in the Punjab. They were pals too, but the terms were different.

People discussed it according to their lights, and girls said in pretty wonderment that Mrs. Harbottle and Mrs. Chichele were like men, they never kissed each other. I think Judy prescribed these conditions. Anna was far more a person who did as the world told her. But it was a poor negation to describe all that they never did; there was no common little convention of attachment that did not seem to be tacitly omitted between them. I hope one did not too cynically observe that they offered these to their husbands instead; the redeeming observation was their husbands' complete satisfaction. This they maintained to the end. In the natural order of things Robert Harbottle should have paid heavily for interfering as he did in Paris between a woman and what she was entitled to live for. As a matter of fact he never paid anything at all; I doubt whether he ever knew himself a debtor. Judy kept her temperament under like a current and swam with the tides of the surface, taking refreshing dips only now and then which one traced in her eyes and her hair when she and Robert came back from leave. That sort of thing is lost in the sands of India, but it makes an oasis as it travels, and it sometimes seemed to me a curious pity that she and Anna should sit in the shade of it together, while Robert and Peter Chichele, their titular companions, blundered on in the desert. But after all, if you are born blind—and the men were both immensely liked, and the shooting was good.

Ten years later Somers joined. The Twelfth were at Peshawur. Robert Harbottle was Lieutenant-Colonel by that time and had the regiment. Distinction had incrusted, in the Indian way, upon Peter Chichele, its former colonel; he was General Commanding the District and K.C.B. So we were all still together in Peshawur. It was great luck for the Chicheles, Sir Peter's having the district, though his father's old regiment would have made it pleasant enough for the boy in any case. He came to us, I mean, of course, to two or three of us, with the interest that hangs about a victim of circumstances; we understood that he wasn't a 'born soldier.' Anna had told me on the contrary that he was a sacrifice to family tradition made inevitable by the General's unfortunate investments. Bellona's bridegroom was not a role he fancied, though he would make a kind of compromise as best man; he would agree, she said, to be a war correspondent and write picturesque specials for the London halfpenny press. There was the humour of the poor boy's despair in it, but she conveyed it, I remember, in exactly the same tone with which she had said to me years before that he wanted to drive a milk-cart. She carried quite her half of the family tradition, though she could talk of sacrifice and make her eyes wistful, contemplating for Somers the limitations of the drill-book and the camp of exercise, proclaiming and insisting upon what she would have done if she could only have chosen for him. Anna Chichele saw things that way. With more than a passable sense of all that was involved, if she could have made her son an artist in life or a commander-in-chief, if she could have given him the seeing eye or Order of the Star of India, she would not have hesitated for an instant. Judy, with her single mind, cried out, almost at sight of him, upon them both, I mean both Anna and Sir Peter. Not that the boy carried his condemnation badly, or even obviously; I venture that no one noticed it in the mess; but it was naturally plain to those of us who were under the same. He had put in his two years with a British regiment at Meerut—they nurse subalterns that way for the Indian army—and his eyes no longer played with the tinsel vision of India; they looked instead into the arid stretch beyond. This preoccupation conveyed to the Surgeon-Major's wife the suggestion that Mr. Chichele was the victim of a hopeless attachment. Mrs. Harbottle made no such mistake; she saw simply, I imagine, the beginnings of her own hunger and thirst in him, looking back as she told us across a decade of dusty sunsets to remember them. The decade was there, close to the memory of all of us; we put, from Judy herself downward, an absurd amount of confidence in it.

She looked so well the night she met him. It was English mail day; she depended a great deal upon her letters, and I suppose somebody had written her a word that brought her that happy, still excitement that is the inner mystery of words. He went straight to her with some speech about his mother having given him leave, and for twenty minutes she patronized him on a sofa as his mother would not have dreamed of doing.

Anna Chichele, from the other side of the room, smiled on the pair.

'I depend on you and Judy to be good to him while we are away,' she said. She and Sir Peter were going on leave at the end of the week to Scotland, as usual, for the shooting.

Following her glance I felt incapable of the proportion she assigned me. 'I will see after his socks with pleasure,' I said. 'I think, don't you, we may leave the rest to Judy?'

Her eyes remained upon the boy, and I saw the passion rise in them, at which I turned mine elsewhere. Who can look unperturbed upon such a privacy of nature as that?

'Poor old Judy!' she went on. 'She never would be bothered with him in all his dear hobble-dehoy time; she resented his claims, the unreasonable creature, used to limit me to three anecdotes a week; and now she has him on her hands, if you like. See the pretty air of deference in the way he listens to her! He has nice manners, the villain, if he is a Chichele!'

'Oh, you have improved Sir Peter's,' I said kindly.

'I do hope Judy will think him worth while. I can't quite expect that he will be up to her, bless him, she is so much cleverer, isn't she, than any of us? But if she will just be herself with him it will make such a difference.'

The other two crossed the room to us at that, and Judy gaily made Somers over to his mother, trailing off to find Robert in the billiard-room.

'Well, what has Mrs. Harbottle been telling you?' Anna asked him.

The young man's eye followed Judy, his hand went musingly to his moustache.

'She was telling me,' he said, 'that people in India were sepulchers of themselves, but that now and then one came who could roll away another's stone.'

'It sounds promising,' said Lady Chichele to me.

'It sounds cryptic,' I laughed to Somers, but I saw that he had the key.

I can not say that I attended diligently to Mr. Chichele's socks, but the part corresponding was freely assigned me. After his people went I saw him often. He pretended to find qualities in my tea, implied that he found them in my talk. As a matter of fact it was my inquiring attitude that he loved, the knowledge that there was no detail that he could give me about himself, his impressions and experiences, that was unlikely to interest me. I would not for the world imply that he was egotistical or complacent, absolutely the reverse, but he possessed an articulate soul which found its happiness in expression, and I liked to listen. I feel that these are complicated words to explain a very simple relation, and I pause to wonder what is left to me if I wished to describe his commerce with Mrs. Harbottle. Luckily there is an alternative; one needn't do it. I wish I had somewhere on paper Judy's own account of it at this period, however. It is a thing she would have enjoyed writing and more enjoyed communicating, at this period.

There was a grave reticence in his talk about her which amused me in the beginning. Mrs. Harbottle had been for ten years important enough to us all, but her serious significance, the light and the beauty in her, had plainly been reserved for the discovery of this sensitive and intelligent person not very long from Sandhurst and exactly twenty-six. I was barely allowed a familiar reference, and anything approaching a flippancy was met with penetrating silence. I was almost rebuked for lightly suggesting that she must occasionally find herself bored in Peshawur.

'I think not anywhere,' said Mr. Chichele; 'Mrs. Harbottle is one of the few people who sound the privilege of living.'

This to me, who had counted Mrs. Harbottle's yawns on so many occasions! It became presently necessary to be careful, tactful, in one's implications about Mrs. Harbottle, and to recognize a certain distinction in the fact that one was the only person with whom Mr. Chichele discussed her at all.

The day came when we talked of Robert; it was bound to come in the progress of any understanding and affectionate colloquy which had his wife for inspiration. I was familiar, of course, with Somers's opinion that the Colonel was an awfully good sort; that had been among the preliminaries and become understood as the base of all references. And I liked Robert Harbottle very well myself. When his adjutant called him a born leader of men, however, I felt compelled to look at the statement consideringly.

'In a tight place,' I said—dear me, what expressions had the freedom of our little frontier drawing-rooms!—'I would as soon depend on him as on anybody. But as for leadership—'

'He is such a good fellow that nobody here does justice to his soldierly qualities,' said Mr. Chichele, 'except Mrs. Harbottle.'

'Has she been telling you about them?' I inquired.

'Well,' he hesitated, 'she told me about the Mulla Nulla affair. She is rather proud of that. Any woman would be.'

'Poor dear Judy!' I mused.

Somers said nothing, but looked at me, removing his cigarette, as if my words would be the better of explanation.

'She has taken refuge in them—in Bob Harbottle's soldierly qualities—ever since she married him,' I continued.

'Taken refuge,' he repeated, coldly, but at my uncompromising glance his eyes fell.

'Well?' I said.

'You mean—'

'Oh, I mean what I say,' I laughed. 'Your cigarette has gone out—have another.'

'I think her devotion to him splendid.'

'Quite splendid. Have you seen the things he brought her from the Simla Art Exhibition? He said they were nice bits of colour, and she has hung them in the drawing-room, where she will have to look at them every day. Let us admire her—dear Judy.'

'Oh,' he said, with a fine air of detachment, 'do you think they are so necessary, those agreements?'

'Well,' I replied, 'we see that they are not indispensable. More sugar? I have only given you one lump. And we know, at all events,' I added, unguardedly, 'that she could never have had an illusion about him.'

The young man looked up quickly. 'Is that story true?' he asked.

'There was a story, but most of us have forgotten it. Who told you?'

'The doctor.'

'The Surgeon-Major,' I said, 'has an accurate memory and a sense of proportion. As I suppose you were bound to get it from somebody, I am glad you got it from him.'

I was not prepared to go on, and saw with some relief that Somers was not either. His silence, as he smoked, seemed to me deliberate; and I had oddly enough at this moment for the first time the impression that he was a man and not a boy. Then the Harbottles themselves joined us, very cheery after a gallop from the Wazir-Bagh. We talked of old times, old friendships, good swords that were broken, names that had carried far, and Somers effaced himself in the perfect manner of the British subaltern. It was a long, pleasant gossip, and I thought Judy seemed rather glad to let her husband dictate its level, which, of course, he did. I noticed when the three rode away together that the Colonel was beginning to sit down rather solidly on his big New Zealander; and I watched the dusk come over from the foothills for a long time thinking more kindly than I had spoken of Robert Harbottle.

I have often wondered how far happiness is contributed to a temperament like Judy Harbottle's, and how far it creates its own; but I doubt whether, on either count, she found as much in any other winter of her life except perhaps the remote ones by the Seine. Those ardent hours of hers, when everything she said was touched with the flame of her individuality, came oftener; she suddenly cleaned up her palate and began to translate in one study after another the language of the frontier country, that spoke only in stones and in shadows under the stones and in sunlight over them. There is nothing in the Academy of this year, at all events, that I would exchange for the one she gave me. She lived her physical life at a pace which carried us all along with her; she hunted and drove and danced and dined with such sincere intention as convinced us all that in hunting and driving and dancing and dining there were satisfactions that had been somehow overlooked. The Surgeon-Major's wife said it was delightful to meet Mrs. Harbottle, she seemed to enjoy everything so thoroughly; the Surgeon-Major looked at her critically and asked her if she were quite sure she hadn't a night temperature. He was a Scotchman. One night Colonel Harbottle, hearing her give away the last extra, charged her with renewing her youth.

'No, Bob,' she said, 'only imitating it.'

Ah, that question of her youth. It was so near her—still, she told me once, she heard the beat of its flying, and the pulse in her veins answered the false signal. That was afterward, when she told the truth. She was not so happy when she indulged herself otherwise. As when she asked one to remember that she was a middle-aged woman, with middle-aged thoughts and satisfactions.

'I am now really happiest,' she declared, 'when the Commissioner takes me in to dinner, when the General Commanding leads me to the dance.'

She did her best to make it an honest conviction. I offered her a recent success not crowned by the Academy, and she put it down on the table. 'By and by,' she said. 'At present I am reading Pascal and Bossuet.' Well, she was reading Pascal and Bossuet. She grieved aloud that most of our activities in India were so indomitably youthful, owing to the accident that most of us were always so young. 'There is no dignified distraction in this country,' she complained, 'for respectable ladies nearing forty.' She seemed to like to make these declarations in the presence of Somers Chichele, who would look at her with a little queer smile—a bad translation, I imagine, of what he felt.

She gave herself so generously to her seniors that somebody said Mrs. Harbottle's girdle was hung with brass hats. It seems flippant to add that her complexion was as honest as the day, but the fact is that the year before Judy had felt compelled, like the rest of us, to repair just a little the ravages of the climate. If she had never done it one would not have looked twice at the absurdity when she said of the powder-puff in the dressing-room, 'I have raised that thing to the level of an immorality,' and sailed in to dance with an uncompromising expression and a face uncompromised. I have not spoken of her beauty; for one thing it was not always there, and there were people who would deny it altogether, or whose considered comment was, 'I wouldn't call her plain.' They, of course, were people in whom she declined to be interested, but even for those of us who could evoke some demonstration of her vivid self her face would not always light in correspondence. When it did there was none that I liked better to look at; and I envied Somers Chichele his way to make it the pale, shining thing that would hold him lifted, in return, for hours together, with I know not what mystic power of a moon upon the tide. And he? Oh, he was dark and delicate, by nature simple, sincere, delightfully intelligent. His common title to charm was the rather sweet seriousness that rested on his upper lip, and a certain winning gratification in his attention; but he had a subtler one in his eyes, which must be always seeking and smiling over what they found; those eyes of perpetual inquiry for the exquisite which ask so little help to create it. A personality to button up in a uniform, good heavens!

As I begin to think of them together I remember how the maternal note appeared in her talk about him.

'His youth is pathetic,' she told me, 'but there is nothing that he does not understand.'

'Don't apologize, Judy,' I said. We were so brusque on the frontier. Besides, the matter still suffered a jocular presentment. Mrs. Harbottle and Mr. Chichele were still 'great friends'; we could still put them next each other at our dinner-parties without the feeling that it would be 'marked.' There was still nothing unusual in the fact that when Mrs. Harbottle was there Mr. Chichele might be taken for granted. We were so broad-minded also, on the frontier.

It grew more obvious, the maternal note. I began positively to dread it, almost as much, I imagine, as Somers did. She took her privileges all in Anna's name, she exercised her authority quite as Lady Chichele's proxy. She went to the very limit. 'Anna Chichele,' she said actually in his presence, 'is a fortunate woman. She has all kinds of cleverness, and she has her tall son. I have only one little talent, and I have no tall son.' Now it was not in nature that she could have had a son as tall as Somers, nor was that desire in her eyes. All civilization implies a good deal of farce, but this was a poor refuge, a cheap device; I was glad when it fell away from her sincerity, when the day came on which she looked into my fire and said simply, 'An attachment like ours has no terms.'

'I wonder,' I said.

'For what comes and goes,' she went on dreamily, 'how could there be a formula?'

'Look here, Judy,' I said, 'you know me very well. What if the flesh leaps with the spirit?'

She looked at me, very white. 'Oh no,' she said, 'no.'

I waited, but there seemed nothing more that she could say; and in the silence the futile negative seemed to wander round the room repeating itself like an echo, 'Oh no, no.' I poked the fire presently to drown the sound of it. Judy sat still, with her feet crossed and her hands thrust into the pockets of her coat, staring into the coals.

'Can you live independently, satisfied with your interests and occupations?' she demanded at last. 'Yes, I know you can. I can't. I must exist more than half in other people. It is what they think and feel that matters to me, just as much as what I think and feel. The best of life is in that communication.'

'It has always been a passion with you, Judy,' I replied. 'I can imagine how much you must miss—'

'Whom?'

'Anna Chichele,' I said softly.

She got up and walked about the room, fixing here and there an intent regard upon things which she did not see. 'Oh, I do,' she said at one point, with the effect of pulling herself together. She took another turn or two, and then finding herself near the door she went out. I felt as profoundly humiliated for her as if she had staggered.

The next night was one of those that stand out so vividly, for no reason that one can identify, in one's memory. We were dining with the Harbottles, a small party, for a tourist they had with them. Judy and I and Somers and the traveller had drifted out into the veranda, where the scent of Japanese lilies came and went on the spring wind to trouble the souls of any taken unawares. There was a brightness beyond the foothills where the moon was coming, and I remember how one tall clump swayed out against it, and seemed in passionate perfume to lay a burden on the breast. Judy moved away from it and sat clasping her knees on the edge of the veranda. Somers, when his eyes were not upon her, looked always at the lily.

Even the spirit of the globe-trotter was stirred, and he said, 'I think you Anglo-Indians live in a kind of little paradise.'

There was an instant's silence, and then Judy turned her face into the lamplight from the drawing-room. 'With everything but the essentials,' she said.

We stayed late; Mr. Chichele and ourselves were the last to go. Judy walked with us along the moonlit drive to the gate, which is so unnecessary a luxury in India that the servants always leave it open. She swung the stiff halves together.

'Now,' she said, 'it is shut.'

'And I,' said Somers Chichele, softly and quickly, 'am on the other side.'

Even over that depth she could flash him a smile. 'It is the business of my life,' she gave him in return, 'to keep this gate shut.' I felt as if they had forgotten us. Somers mounted and rode off without a word. We were walking in a different direction. Looking back, I saw Judy leaning immovable on the gate, while Somers turned in his saddle, apparently to repeat the form of lifting his hat. And all about them stretched the stones of Kabul valley, vague and formless in the tide of the moonlight...

Next day a note from Mrs. Harbottle informed me that she had gone to Bombay for a fortnight. In a postscript she wrote, 'I shall wait for the Chicheles there, and come back with them.' I remember reflecting that if she could not induce herself to take a passage to England in the ship that brought them, it seemed the right thing to do.

She did come back with them. I met the party at the station. I knew Somers would meet them, and it seemed to me, so imminent did disaster loom, that someone else should be there, someone to offer a covering movement or a flank support wherever it might be most needed. And among all our smiling faces disaster did come, or the cold premonition of it. We were all perfect, but Somers's lip trembled. Deprived for a fortnight he was eager for the draft, and he was only twenty-six. His lip trembled, and there, under the flickering station-lamps, suddenly stood that of which there never could be again any denial, for those of us who saw.

Did we make, I wonder, even a pretense of disguising the consternation that sprang up among us, like an armed thing, ready to kill any further suggestion of the truth? I don't know. Anna Chichele's unfinished sentence dropped as if someone had given her a blow upon the mouth. Coolies were piling the luggage into a hired carriage at the edge of the platform. She walked mechanically after them, and would have stepped in with it but for the sight of her own gleaming landau drawn up within a yard or two, and the General waiting. We all got home somehow, taking it with us, and I gave Lady Chichele twenty-four hours to come to me with her face all one question and her heart all one fear. She came in twelve.

'Have you seen it—long?' Prepared as I was her directness was demoralizing.

'It isn't a mortal disease.'

'Oh, for Heaven's sake—'

'Well, not with certainty, for more than a month.'

She made a little spasmodic movement with her hands, then dropped them pitifully. 'Couldn't you do ANYthing?'

I looked at her, and she said at once, 'No, of course you couldn't.'

For a moment or two I took my share of the heavy sense of it, my trivial share, which yet was an experience sufficiently exciting. 'I am afraid it will have to be faced,' I said.

'What will happen?' Anna cried. 'Oh, what will happen?'

'Why not the usual thing?' Lady Chichele looked up quickly as if at a reminder. 'The ambiguous attachment of the country,' I went on, limping but courageous, 'half declared, half admitted, that leads vaguely nowhere, and finally perishes as the man's life enriches itself—the thing we have seen so often.'

'Whatever Judy is capable of it won't be the usual thing. You know that.'

I had to confess in silence that I did.

'It flashed at me—the difference in her—in Bombay.' She pressed her lips together and then went on unsteadily. 'In her eyes, her voice. She was mannered, extravagant, elaborate. With me! All the way up I wondered and worried. But I never thought—' She stopped; her voice simply shook itself into silence. I called a servant.

'I am going to give you a good stiff peg,' I said. I apologize for the 'peg,' but not for the whisky and soda. It is a beverage on the frontier, of which the vulgarity is lost in the value. While it was coming I tried to talk of other things, but she would only nod absently in the pauses.

'Last night we dined with him, it was guest night at the mess, and she was there. I watched her, and she knew it. I don't know whether she tried, but anyway, she failed. The covenant between them was written on her forehead whenever she looked at him, though that was seldom. She dared not look at him. And the little conversation that they had—you would have laughed—it was a comedy of stutters. The facile Mrs. Harbottle!'

'You do well to be angry, naturally,' I said; 'but it would be fatal to let yourself go, Anna.'

'Angry?' Oh, I am SICK. The misery of it! The terror of it! If it were anybody but Judy! Can't you imagine the passion of a temperament like that in a woman who has all these years been feeding on herself? I tell you she will take him from my very arms. And he will go—to I dare not imagine what catastrophe! Who can prevent it? Who can prevent it?'

'There is you,' I said.

Lady Chichele laughed hysterically. 'I think you ought to say, "There are you." I—what can I do? Do you realize that it's JUDY? My friend—my other self? Do you think we can drag all that out of it? Do you think a tie like that can be broken by an accident—by a misfortune? With it all I ADORE Judy Harbottle. I love her, as I have always loved her, and—it's damnable, but I don't know whether, whatever happened, I wouldn't go on loving her.'

'Finish your peg,' I said. She was sobbing.

'Where I blame myself most,' she went on, 'is for not seeing in him all that makes him mature to her—that makes her forget the absurd difference between them, and take him simply and sincerely as I know she does, as the contemporary of her soul if not of her body. I saw none of that. Could I, as his mother? Would he show it to me? I thought him just a charming boy, clever, too, of course, with nice instincts and well plucked; we were always proud of that, with his delicate physique. Just a boy! I haven't yet stopped thinking how different he looks without his curls. And I thought she would be just kind and gracious and delightful to him because he was my son.'

'There, of course,' I said, 'is the only chance.'

'Where—what?'

'He is your son.'

'Would you have me appeal to her? Do you know I don't think I could?'

'Dear me, no. Your case must present itself. It must spring upon her and grow before her out of your silence, and if you can manage it, your confidence. There is a great deal, after all, remember, to hold her in that. I can't somehow imagine her failing you. Otherwise—'

Lady Chichele and I exchanged a glance of candid admission.

'Otherwise she would be capable of sacrificing everything—everything. Of gathering her life into an hour. I know. And do you know if the thing were less impossible, less grotesque, I should not be so much afraid? I mean that the ABSOLUTE indefensibility of it might bring her a recklessness and a momentum which might—'

'Send her over the verge,' I said. 'Well, go home and ask her to dinner.'

There was a good deal more to say, of course, than I have thought proper to put down here, but before Anna went I saw that she was keyed up to the heroic part. This was none the less to her credit because it was the only part, the dictation of a sense of expediency that despaired while it dictated. The noble thing was her capacity to take it, and, amid all that warred in her, to carry it out on the brave high lines of her inspiration. It seemed a literal inspiration, so perfectly calculated that it was hard not to think sometimes, when one saw them together, that Anna had been lulled into a simple resumption of the old relation. Then from the least thing possible—the lift of an eyelid—it flashed upon one that between these two every moment was dramatic, and one took up the word with a curious sense of detachment and futility, but with one's heart beating like a trip-hammer with the mad excitement of it. The acute thing was the splendid sincerity of Judy Harbottle's response. For days she was profoundly on her guard, then suddenly she seemed to become practically, vividly aware of what I must go on calling the great chance, and passionately to fling herself upon it. It was the strangest cooperation without a word or a sign to show it conscious—a playing together for stakes that could not be admitted, a thing to hang upon breathless. It was there between them—the tenable ground of what they were to each other: they occupied it with almost an equal eye upon the tide that threatened, while I from my mainland tower also made an anguished calculation of the chances. I think in spite of the menace, they found real beatitudes; so keenly did they set about the business that it brought them moments finer than any they could count in the years that were behind them, the flat and colourless years that were gone. Once or twice the wild idea even visited me that it was, after all, the projection of his mother in Somers that had so seized Judy Harbottle, and that the original was all that was needed to help the happy process of detachment. Somers himself at the time was a good deal away on escort duty: they had a clear field.

I can not tell exactly when—between Mrs. Harbottle and myself—it became a matter for reference more or less overt, I mean her defined problem, the thing that went about between her and the sun. It will be imagined that it did not come up like the weather; indeed, it was hardly ever to be envisaged and never to be held; but it was always there, and out of our joint consciousness it would sometimes leap and pass, without shape or face. It might slip between two sentences, or it might remain, a dogging shadow, for an hour. Or a week would go by while, with a strong hand, she held it out of sight altogether and talked of Anna—always of Anna. Her eyes shone with the things she told me then: she seemed to keep herself under the influence of them as if they had the power of narcotics. At the end of a time like this she turned to me in the door as she was going and stood silent, as if she could neither go nor stay. I had been able to make nothing of her that afternoon: she had seemed preoccupied with the pattern of the carpet which she traced continually with her riding crop, and finally I, too, had relapsed. She sat haggard, with the fight forever in her eyes, and the day seemed to sombre about her in her corner. When she turned in the door, I looked up with sudden prescience of a crisis.

'Don't jump,' she said, 'it was only to tell you that I have persuaded Robert to apply for furlough. Eighteen months. From the first of April. Don't touch me.' I suppose I made a movement towards her. Certainly I wanted to throw my arms about her; with the instinct, I suppose, to steady her in her great resolution.

'At the end of that time, as you know, he will be retired. I had some trouble, he is so keen on the regiment, but I think—I have succeeded. You might mention it to Anna.'

'Haven't you?' sprang past my lips.

'I can't. It would be like taking an oath to tell her, and—I can't take an oath to go. But I mean to.'

'There is nothing to be said,' I brought out, feeling indeed that there was not. 'But I congratulate you, Judy.'

'No, there is nothing to be said. And you congratulate me, no doubt!'

She stood for a moment quivering in the isolation she made for herself; and I felt a primitive angry revolt against the delicate trafficking of souls that could end in such ravage and disaster. The price was too heavy; I would have denuded her, at the moment, of all that had led her into this, and turned her out a clod with fine shoulders like fifty other women in Peshawur. Then, perhaps, because I held myself silent and remote and she had no emotion of fear from me, she did not immediately go.

'It will beat itself away, I suppose, like the rest of the unreasonable pain of the world,' she said at last; and that, of course, brought me to her side. 'Things will go back to their proportions. This,' she touched an open rose, 'will claim its beauty again. And life will become—perhaps—what it was before.' Still I found nothing to say, I could only put my arm in hers and walk with her to the edge of the veranda where the syce was holding her horse. She stroked the animal's neck. 'Everything in me answered him,' she informed me, with the grave intelligence of a patient who relates a symptom past. As she took the reins she turned to me again. 'His spirit came to mine like a homing bird,' she said, and in her smile even the pale reflection of happiness was sweet and stirring. It left me hanging in imagination over the source and the stream, a little blessed in the mere understanding.

Too much blessed for confidence, or any safe feeling that the source was bound. Rather I saw it leaping over every obstacle, flashing to its destiny. As I drove to the Club next day I decided that I would not tell Anna Chichele of Colonel Harbottle's projected furlough. If to Judy telling her would be like taking an oath that they would go, to me it would at least be like assuming sponsorship for their intention. That would be heavy indeed. From the first of April—we were then in March. Anna would hear it soon enough from the General, would see it soon enough, almost, in the 'Gazette', when it would have passed into irrecoverable fact. So I went by her with locked lips, kept out of the way of those eyes of the mother that asked and asked, and would have seen clear to any depth, any hiding-place of knowledge like that. As I pulled up at the Club I saw Colonel Harbottle talking concernedly to the wife of our Second-in-Command, and was reminded that I had not heard for some days how Major Watkins was going on. So I, too, approached Mrs. Watkins in her victoria to ask. Robert Harbottle kindly forestalled her reply. 'Hard luck, isn't it? Watkins has been ordered home at once. Just settled into their new house, too—last of the kit came up from Calcutta yesterday, didn't it, Mrs. Watkins? But it's sound to go—Peshawur is the worst hole in Asia to shake off dysentery in.'

We agreed upon this and discussed the sale-list of her new furniture that Mrs. Watkins would have to send round the station, and considered the chances of a trooper—to the Watkinses with two children and not a penny but his pay it did make it easier not to have to go by a liner—and Colonel Harbottle and I were halfway to the reading-room before the significance of Major Watkins's sick-leave flashed upon me.