At the door she turned and came back.
‘It is now eleven o’clock,’ she said. ‘The person I am telegraphing to is on her way down to get tonight’s train at Kalka. I am hoping to catch her half-way at Solon. Do you think I can?’
‘I think so, madam. Oyess! It is the custom to stop at Solon for tiffin. The telegram can arrive there. All urgent telegram going very quick.’
‘And in any case,’ said Madeline, ‘it can not fail to reach her at Kalka?’
‘Not possible to fail, madam.’
‘She will have her chance,’ she said to herself, on her way to the post office to order her tonga. And with a little nauseated shudder at the thought of the letter in her pocket, she added, ‘It is amazing. I should have thought her too good a woman of business!’ After which she concentrated her whole attention upon the necessities of departure. Her single immediate apprehension was that Horace Innes might, by some magic of circumstances, be transported back into Simla before she could get out of it. That such a contingency was physically impossible made no difference to her nerves, and to the last Brookes was the hurrying victim of unnecessary promptings.
The little rambling hotel of Kalka, where the railway spreads out over the plains, raises its white-washed shelter under the very walls of the Himalayas. Madeline, just arrived, lay back in a long wicker chair on the veranda, and looked up at them as they mounted green and grey and silent under the beating of the first of the rains. Everywhere was a luxury of silence, the place was steeped in it, drowned in it. A feeding cow flicked an automatic tail under a tree. Near the low mud wall that strolled irresolutely between the house and the hills leaned a bush with a few single pink roses; their petals were floating down under the battering drops. A draggled bee tried to climb to a dry place on a pillar of the veranda. Above all, the hills, immediate, towering, all grey and green, solidly ideal, with phantasies of mist. Everything drippingly soft and silent. Suddenly the venetian blind that hung before the door of a bedroom farther on swayed out before a hand variously ringed to emit a lady in a pink lawn dress with apt embroideries. Madeline’s half-closed eyes opened very wide, and for an instant she and the lady, to whom I must once more refer as Mrs. Innes, confronted each other. Then Mrs. Innes’s countenance expanded, and she took three or four light steps forward.
‘Oh, you dear thing!’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought you were in Simla! Imagine you being here! Do you know you have SAVED me!’
Madeline regarded her in silence, while a pallor spread over her face and lips, and her features grew sharp with a presage of pain.
‘Have I?’ she stammered. She could not think.