'My dear Gwen,' he replied readily, 'there is no need for defence. The angel is not astray since you are here with us, and we are in Paradise.'
George Keene applauded with both hands as he sat at her feet looking out over the plains. Once more it seemed incredible that there should be such a place on God's earth as Hodinuggur.
'Well, some of us will be sitting at the gate thereof disconsolate ere long,' remarked a man leaning against a rock, with a cup of black coffee and a cigarette. 'By the way, Keene, we might share a tonga the day after tomorrow.'
'Mr. Keene is not going,' interrupted Mrs. Boynton quickly. 'No one wants him down there, and we need dancing men dreadfully. Miss Tweedie had spoken to her father about it?'
'And you?'
The question, which came almost in a whisper, was answered by a smile only; but it brought a sort of mist to George Keene's young eyes as he looked out over the plains again. The spiritual exaltation of it all was almost too much at times for the hard-headed young fellow who had clothed his own honest uprightness with a woman's softness and sweetness, in order to worship it.
Now, as a matter of fact, Mrs. Boynton had said nothing to Colonel Tweedie about the lad's leave; still, as she fully intended doing so in the course of the afternoon, her smile was perhaps excusable. 'What is more, she kept to her intention. Half an hour afterwards any one rash enough to do so might have interrupted a tête-à-tête she was conceding to the Colonel in the shade of a huge deodar tree to one side of a level stretch where two mud tennis-courts had been laid out. But no one did. A certain officialdom prevails in Simla society, and the heads of departments have recognised rights and privileges. The Colonel, however, would scarcely have admitted that he owed his good fortune to his seniority, for he felt juvenile in a new lounge suit with very baggy trousers--quite the thing for lolling about in on the grass while a pretty woman leant over the shafts of the dandy she was using as a seat, and asked for your opinion on a number of trivial personal questions. Yet Gwen Boynton was in earnest about it all--to judge from her eyes--as she let the conversation drift further afield.
'He is such a nice boy--one of those boys who make a woman think how delightful it would be to have a son in her old age. But he looks as if he would be the better of another week in the hills; and I suppose even you cannot manage that.'
He smiled condescendingly.
'The Lieutenant-Governor might object, of course.'