Suddenly she turned again and looked at me half wistfully.
“It is good to talk to you. You want to know. You are so near it all. I wish I could help you; I am so exquisitely happy myself.”
My writing was at a standstill. It seemed the groping of a blind man in a radiant world. Once perhaps I had felt that life was good in itself—when the guns came thundering toward the Vimy Ridge in a mad gallop of horses, and men shouting and swearing and frantically urging them on. Then, riding for more than life, I had tasted life for an instant. Not before or since. But this woman had the secret.
Lady Meryon, with her escort of girls and subalterns, came daintily past the hotel compound, and startled me from my brooding with her pretty silvery voice.
“Dreaming, Mr. Clifden? It isn’t at all wholesome to dream in the East. Come and dine with us tomorrow. A tiny dance afterwards, you know; or bridge for those who like it.”
I had not the faintest notion whether governesses dined with the family or came in afterward with the coffee; but it was a sporting chance, and I took it.
Then Sir John came up and joined us.
“You can’t well dance tomorrow, Kitty,” he said to his wife. “There’s been an outpost affair in the Swat Hills, and young Fitzgerald has been shot. Come to dinner of course, Clifden. Glad to see you. But no dancing, I think.”
Kitty Meryon’s mouth drooped like a pouting child’s. Was it for the lost dance, or the lost soldier lying out on the hills in the dying sunset. Who could tell? In either case it was pretty enough for the illustrated papers.
“How sad! Such a dear boy. We shall miss him at tennis.” Then brightly; “Well, we’ll have to put the dance off for a week, but come tomorrow anyhow.”