He gave another gesture of impatience. 'Don't let us play clumps, for Heaven's sake!' he exclaimed. 'I'll tell you--though it's no good. There is a row on in the city to-night--the native regiment is in it--I have a letter here--or at any rate they won't be much help; and if once we get fighting in the streets----' he shrugged his shoulders--'the only way is to prevent it starting. And Morâki is beyond call. But there's a wing of the Highlanders at Fareedabad, forty miles down the line. If I could have got a wire sent there before the mail passes--the up-mail which left here a little ago--it could have been stopped and sent back with troops. For Fareedabad is only an outpost--no railway stock--so there is only that one chance before midnight. There would have been time then--but now----'
'Then why don't you send one?'
'I?'
'Yes, you! You know the cipher. You know that Sir George would send it.'
'Pardon me!' he said, recovering his breath, recovering his obstinacy, his dislike to coercion, 'I am not in the least sure that he would. Judging by this morning----'
'Then she would--Lady Arbuthnot, I mean. And you--you are bound to do it for her-you know you are bound----'
'I?' he echoed again.
'Yes, you!' she repeated, and there was a quiver in her voice--'because you loved each other once. Oh! she didn't tell me--I have been learning a lot of things for myself lately, and I learned that because--but that is nothing! What I mean is, that it hurts her most, for she was wrong--quite wrong--she spoilt your life----'
'Perhaps I may be allowed to differ,' he began, stiffening himself again after his surprise; but she took no notice of his remark. Her face was troubled by her own thought--she was absorbed in it.
'It has come between you and everything, not the regret, but--I don't know what to call it quite--the value you have put upon it. And she has put it too. So you want to forget, and yet you don't. You think it so big a thing that it must be forgotten--made a fuss about. But it isn't. It isn't really part of one at all. I've learned that lately. And there is a better way'--she broke off, and came quite close to him, looking him in the face: 'not to forget, and yet not to care. Do this for her, Mr. Raymond, do it as you would do it for me?' Here, for the first time, a faint smile showed in her eyes, not on her lips. 'It is a funny thing for me to say, perhaps, but--but I gave you the râm rucki, didn't I? And so, no matter what else there is in the world that, perhaps, we can't help, I want you to do this for her and for me together, as you would for a man, as I would do it for a woman.'