"Quite so. Like Mrs Desmond."
"I notice all the cynicism goes out of your voice when you speak of her. Yet you can make insulting prophecies about me, at my own table too! Am I so immeasurably inferior?"
"That remains to be seen! You have still to be tested in the furnace, and no imaginary furnace either. Man or woman, staying power's the great requisite for India, Mrs Lenox. To pull through for half a dozen hot weathers is all very well,—mere getting one's hand in. But by the time a man has completed his twentieth he begins to know something about the weakness of the flesh. I seem to you, with your youth and high courage, a cynical, disagreeable fellow enough. But perhaps when you are middle-aged and disillusioned, and all the good blood in your veins has been dried up by fever, you'll forgive my straight speaking to-night; though by then I shall be a forgotten old fogey, eating my heart out in England, or I shall have dropped in harness, which would be the kinder fate of the two."
"Indeed I have forgiven you already," she answered in a softened tone; and involuntarily her eyes sought the handsome heavy-featured woman beside her husband, whose Paris dinner-dress was cut lower than need be, and whose elaborate 'fringe' rather too obviously grew off her head.
"Thank you. It's more than I deserve; and I'm sorry I must repay you by giving you your first taste of the pleasant little surprises that are a main feature of Frontier life. I have to go off across the Border early next week, to fix the position of a post we are going to build for our Mahsud levies, and to collect a fine from some rascals who have been raiding Tank."
"Where's that?"
"An unlucky village near the Gomal Pass,—the great trade route into the hills. It gets burnt to the ground periodically by the Waziris, probably much to its advantage; but one can't overlook the insult to British authority. So I'm obliged to visit them in state and talk to them like a father, after collecting their fine; and I'm afraid I must take your husband and Richardson along with me, besides a handful of cavalry and infantry by way of protection and prestige."
Quita's face fell. "For how long?" she asked, collecting her last crumbs of pastry with a peculiar deliberation.
"We might be ten days coming and going. Not more."
"And—would there be fighting?"