Next moment she was outside, running in silent terror towards the house in the next compound. The lightly clad figure sped like a ghost through the dim light of the coming dawn, and stumbled through the gap in the low mud boundary, leaving George Coventry standing on the threshold of his house as though he had been turned to stone.
Motionless he stood; then he laughed like a drunken man, and reeled back into the room that smelt of matting and lamp-oil and--violets.
The disappearance of Mr. Kennard and Mrs. Coventry came as a veritable bombshell to the station. Nobody knew exactly what had happened; there were so many different stories. Hitherto people had noticed and talked, some with jealous interest, others more or less good-naturedly, a few with real regret, but none with any expectation of a serious scandal; for domestic disaster is rare in India, in spite of popular delusion to the contrary. And when it occurs, partly because of its rarity, partly because in any community so intimate as one class of the same nationality in exile, such an occurrence goes sharply home, and creates a sensation at once so painful and exciting that it is not quickly forgotten.
It was said that Mrs. Coventry had deliberately left her husband after a terrible scene; another version was that she had confessed on the night of the bachelors' ball to conduct such as had left Captain Coventry no alternative but to allow her to go; again that he had turned her out, and she had sought refuge in Mr. Kennard's bungalow. Someone had seen the runaway couple leaving next day by the mail train for Bombay. The more charitable maintained that the injured husband had been chiefly to blame; he had made a mountain out of a molehill, would listen to no explanation, nor give the benefit of any doubt, driving his wife to the ruinous step she had taken.
All that remained evident was that Mrs. Coventry and Mr. Kennard were no longer seen in the station, and that for a short space of time Captain Coventry continued to perform his regimental duties, to play polo and racquets and cricket, in taciturn silence. His bearing inhibited questions, or mention to him of what had occurred; no one dared to intrude on his secret, and his reticence was respected. A little later he took leave on urgent private affairs and went home; and in due time an undefended divorce case, with Mr. Kennard as co-respondent, was reported without detail in the papers.
Mr. Kennard was eventually heard of in another Province, where, from all accounts, he was as popular as ever with a certain section of society always to be found anywhere, people who are attracted by good dinners and a display of wealth and an apparently superior knowledge of the world, who are content to ask no questions--which they call minding their own business.
Gossip subsided with the fluctuation of the European population of a large Indian station, where the military portion come and go, and civil officials are constantly transferred. Captain Coventry did not come back; he exchanged into the home battalion of his regiment. There came echoes and whispers that little Mrs. Coventry had returned to India after the decree had been made absolute, under the confiding impression that Mr. Kennard would make her his wife. But some declared that, of course, he was not such a fool; others that he had been blackguard enough to refuse to marry her; and what became of her nobody knew, and very few cared; for, after all, it was no one's immediate affair.