This was a subject which Seymour Michael dreaded. He was ignorant of how much Dora might know. He had suspected from the first that Jem Agar's desire that she should know the truth had been a mere matter of sentiment; but the fact of meeting her at this public festivity, gay and in colours, shook this theory from its foundation. He disliked Edith Mazerod, because he suspected that his own early career had probably been discussed in her hearing, and her easy lightness of heart was to him as incomprehensible as it was suspicious. Dora he rather feared without knowing why.
“I suppose you know India well?” she said, looking straight in front of her.
“Too well,” was the reply, with a sharp sidelong glance.
He was right. At that moment Dora might have been one of these habituées of rout and ballroom. She was very pale and looked tired out.
“I went out there thirty years ago,” he continued, “into the Mutiny. From that time to this India has been killing my friends.”
There was a little pause. She knew that in the natural course of events it was almost certain that this man knew Jem personally. It would have been easy to mention his name; but the wound was too fresh, her heart was too sore to bear the sting of hearing him discussed.
For a second Seymour Michael hovered on the brink. His lips almost framed the name. Good almost triumphed over evil.
And the girl sitting there—broken-hearted, quiet and strong, as only women can be—never knew how near she was. Sometimes it seems as if the cruelty of fate were unnecessary, as if the word too little or the word too much, which has the power to alter a whole life, were withheld or spoken merely to further a Providential experiment.
“Yes,” said Michael, “I hate India.”
And the spell was broken, the moment lost for ever. Seymour Michael had kept silence, and elsewhere, perhaps, at that very moment his doom was spoken. Who can tell? We are offered chances—we are, if you will, the puppets of an experiment—and surely there must be a moment which decides.