"I also," he responded.
They walked silently side by side along the well-kept path, each immersed in his own thoughts and soothed by the knowledge that their friendship had reached a height where silence is permitted—becomes even the purest form of expression. At the bottom of the compound they reached a large, low-built building, evidently once a dwelling-place, overgrown with wild plants and half in ruins, whose dim outlines stood out against the darkening background of trees and sky. The door stood open, and must indeed have stood open for many years, for the broken hinges were rusty and seemed to be clinging to the torn woodwork only by the strength of undisturbed custom.
Stafford came to a halt.
"That is where—" he began, and then abruptly left his sentence unfinished.
"Yes," she said, "it is here. I don't think, as long as we live in India, that my guardian will ever have it touched. He calls it the Memorial. My father was his greatest friend, and the terrible fact that he came too late to save him has saddened his whole life."
Stafford looked down at her. The light from a lantern which Mrs. Carmichael, with great dexterity, had fixed among some overhanging branches, fell on the dark features, now composed and thoughtful. She met his glance in silence, with large eyes that had taken into their depths something of the surrounding shadow. He had never felt so strongly before the peculiarity of her fascination—perhaps because he had never seen her in a setting which seemed so entirely a part of herself. The distant music, the hum of voices, and that strange charm which permeates an Indian nightfall—above all, the ruined bungalow with its shattered door and silent memories—these things, with their sharp contrasts of laughter and tragedy, had formed themselves into a background which belonged to her, so that she and they seemed inseparable.
"Oh, Lois, little girl!" Stafford said gently. "I have always thought of you as standing alone, different from everything and everybody, a stranger from another world, irresistible, incomprehensible. I have just understood that you are part and parcel of it all, child of the sun and flowers and mysteries and wonders. It is I who am the stranger!"
"Hush!" she said, in a voice of curious pain. "Hush! Let us go back. We must dance—whether we will or not."
He followed her without protest. The very rustle of her muslin skirts over the fallen leaves made for his ears a new and fantastic music.
Close behind them wandered the two captains, Webb and Saunders, arm in arm. At the entrance to Colonel Carmichael's Memorial Webb stopped, and, striking a match against the door, proceeded to light his cigar. The tiny flame lit up for an instant the languid patrician features.