'I suppose it is always "cherchez la femme"; yet it does not seem to me an agreeable factor in existence.'

'Cherchez la femme!' echoed Dan. 'Why not? They are our mothers and sisters, our sweethearts and wives, after all. And have you ever thought, Gordon, what it must be like to look back over a lifetime, and see next to nothing that you would rather have left undone? Or, if you're pious, to take a sort of pride in pillorying yourself for a cross word or a tarradiddle? There isn't a man in a million with that record, but half the women one meets--ay! half the women one patronises--have it. Perhaps it is small blame to anything but fate; still they have it.'

'Or think they have--which has the same effect! You remind me of a countryman of yours, a doctor, I knew once. "The sex," he said, "can't do wrong, and when it does it's hysteria." However, let us leave that poor lad to rest in peace; in a way that is more worth than the happiness of any woman who ever was born. And, look here, make the tale of reports complete, send them to me, and I'll consign them, dates and all, to a pigeon-hole. That is the beauty of official mistakes; you can pigeon-hole them and no one is the wiser, unless, indeed, some personal motive crops up. But that is not likely. So far as I can see, it is to no one's interest to make a row--not even if there is a woman at the bottom of it all.'

There was a concentrated bitterness in his tone, due to no cynicism, but rather to an intensity of pain; for if Rose Tweedie belonged by birth to that strange latter-day feminine development which unconsciously sets passion aside both from mind and emotion, and will none of it spiritually or physically, Lewis belonged to that still larger class of men who have driven it from the mind: who say openly that it is despicable; but that the world cannot get on without it; who insist in a breath in its unworthiness and its necessity. Gwen, he said to himself after Dan had gone, was very woman, capable of ruining any man in a week if she chose, and then being sorrowfully surprised at the result. Still it would be unkind to wound her needlessly by telling her that result; the more so because she would certainly tell other people, and Rose Tweedie might break her heart over it. Even if the pigeon-holed mistake were found out, they might get up a fiction about the telegram having reached George after all. The compensation might have to be given; but even in that case he could see no need for raking up the mud, since the claim would be a just one.

Nevertheless a week after, when he and Dan were once more seated opposite each other at the office-table, he felt vaguely uncomfortable. For a schedule of the dead lad's debts lay between them ready for the Administrator-General, and that showed an item of six thousand rupees borrowed on George's note of hand, backed by some youngsters on the very day on which he had left Simla.

'It was a first holiday, you know,' said Dan regretfully. 'And Hodinuggur is such a hole. There were the races, you know, and--and----'

'Cherchez la femme,' quoted Lewis; 'I don't blame him, not a bit. But if there had been an inquiry, Fitzgerald?-----'

Dan shook his head and sighed fiercely. 'Yes! I know. For all that, he was straight--straight as a die! My only regret in keeping the thing dark is that some one has to go scot-free.'

[CHAPTER XXI]

A shivering woman in one pannier; in the other, such things as a breathless fugitive can gather together in one hurried half hour. Between them the hump of a camel, a camel which every instant seems as if it must split into halves as its long splay legs slither and slide in the mud that covers all things.