They laughed as at a great joke, and, others listening, smiled in sympathy, while Joyce turned her burning face away.
It seemed that there was no getting away from the story of her husband's shame. But for her having left him, this would never have been!
When the train drew up at the platform of the station in Darjeeling, she pulled herself together and stepped bravely out of her compartment, head erect, and manner perfectly composed. The need to have herself well in hand, gave her strength of mind for the occasion, so that none of her old friends—were she to come unexpectedly upon any—should think her crushed and miserable; a poor, humiliated wife! No! the world should see a laughing face.
As the roads of the Station were very familiar to her, she climbed the path leading to the Cosmopolitan Hotel, at which her husband was staying. It rose by easy stages to a higher level and passed by red-brick villas built on the English plan, with pent roofs and homely chimney-pots. In parts the road was clear, in others, heavily shaded by tall firs, through the branches of which could be seen the Snowy Range bathed in the soft afterglow of a lurid sunset. Preceding her was a Lepcha boy from Sikkim, carrying her trunk mountaineer fashion on his back, strapped to his forehead; and it was a mystery how he lifted himself as well as his burden up the short cuts, without pausing to draw breath.
CHAPTER XXV
THE MEETING
While Joyce climbed the road preceded by her Lepcha coolie, a scene of dramatic possibilities was taking place in a room of the hotel to which she was bound.
It was Mr. Meredith's sitting-room, comfortably furnished; a fire was burning cheerfully in the grate, and the actors were himself and Mrs. Dalton, who had called upon him in a crisis of her affairs.