E-text prepared by Al Haines

THE GREAT AMULET

by

MAUD DIVER

"Love is the greatest Amulet that makes this world a garden: and 'Hope comes to all' outwears the accidents of life; and reaches with tremulous hands beyond the grave and Death."

—R. L. S.

"Four things come not back to man or woman: the sped arrow; the spoken word; the past life; and the neglected opportunity."

—Omar El Khuttub.

THE GREAT AMULET

by

MAUD DIVER

Author of "Captain Desmond, V.C."

Shilling Edition

William Blackwood and Sons
Edinburgh and London
MCMXV
All rights reserved

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO

TRIX FLEMING

IN MEMORY OF DALHOUSIE DAYS.

Let thy heart see that still the same
Burns early friendship's sacred flame,
The affinities have strongest part
In youth, to draw men heart to heart:
As life draws on, and finds no rest,
The individual in each breast
Is tyrannous to sunder them.

—Rossetti.

CONTENTS.

PROLOGUE

BOOK I.

AFTER FIVE YEARS

BOOK II.

JUST IMPEDIMENT

BOOK III.

THE TENTS OF ISHMAEL

BOOK IV.

THE VALLEY OF DECISION

THE GREAT AMULET.

PROLOGUE.

I.

"The little more, and how much it is!
The little less, and what worlds away."
—Browning.

No one in Zermatt dreamed that a wedding had been solemnised in the English church on that September afternoon of the early eighties. Tourists and townsfolk alike had been cheated of a legitimate thrill of interest and speculation. Nor would even the most percipient have recognised as bride and bridegroom the tall dark Englishman, in a rough shooting suit, and the girl, in simple white travelling gear, who stood together, an hour later, on the outskirts of the little town, and took leave of their solitary wedding guest:—an artist cap-à-pie; velveteen coat, loosely knotted tie, and soft felt hat complete.

In this Bohemian garb Michael Maurice,—as the bride's brother,—had led his sister up the aisle, and duly surrendered her to Captain Lenox, R.A., serenely unaware, the while, of censorious side-glances bestowed upon him by the ascetic-featured chaplain, who had an air of officiating under protest, of silently asserting his own aloofness from this hole-and-corner method of procedure. But his attitude was powerless to affect the exalted emotion of that strange half-hour, wherein, by the repetition of a few simple, forcible words, a man and woman take upon themselves the hardest task on earth with a valiant assurance which is at once pathetic and sublime.

To Quita Maurice, impressionable at all times, the absence of ceremony, of those trivialities which obscure and belittle the one supreme fact, gave an added solemnity to the unadorned service: forced upon her a half-disturbing realisation that she was passing from an independence, dearer to her than life, into the keeping of a man:—a man of whom she knew little beyond the fact that he loved her with a strength and singleness of heart which is the heritage of those who reach life's summit without indulging in emotional excursions by the way.

And now all needful preliminaries were over; even to the wedding breakfast, a cheerful, casual meal of cold chicken, iced cake, and a bottle of champagne, served in Maurice's unpretentious rooms, on the pastry-cook's second floor.

The scene of their brief courtship lay behind them, dozing in the golden stillness of late September: before them a footpath climbed through a forest of pine and fir to the Eiffel Alp Hotel; and on all sides multitudinous mountains flung heroic contours outward and upward, to a galaxy of peaks, that glittered diamond-bright upon a turquoise sky. A mule, ready-saddled, champed his bit at a respectful distance from the trio: for Lenox, an indefatigable mountaineer, had insisted on taking the footpath up to the Eiffel; where they would spend ten days, before crossing into Italy, and so on to Brindisi, en route for his station in India.

The expiration of his leave, and his determination to take Quita Maurice back with him, were responsible for the brevity of their engagement, and for the absence, in both, of that brand-new aspect which proclaims a bride and bridegroom to an eternally interested world.

For this last Eldred Lenox was abundantly grateful. All the Scot in him asserted itself in a fierce reticence, an inbred sense of privacy where a man's deepest feelings were concerned: and now, as he stood battling with his impatience to be gone, he was suffering acute discomfiture from the demonstrative leave-taking in progress between Maurice and his sister. For their sakes, at least, he would fain have effaced himself: while they, as a matter of fact, were momentarily oblivious of his existence.

Artists both, of no mean quality, they had lived and worked together for five years, since the day when Michael had rented his first modest studio in the King's Road, Chelsea: and, setting aside Art, his feeling for Quita was the one serious element in a nature light and variable as a summer cloud. From his French mother he derived an elastic spirit that yielded itself to the emotion of the passing moment; and Lenox, watching him, marvelled at the sharp dividing-lines drawn between the different races of earth.

He half resented such facility of self-expression. Possibly he envied it: though no doubt he would have denied the impeachment with an oath.

Eventually it occurred to Maurice that he could not well stand in the roadway till sunset, taking leave of the sister he was so loth to lose, and, with a sigh of exasperation, he pushed her gently towards her husband.

"Voilà, cherie, . . . enough of my endless adieux, or ce bon Lenox may be tempted to break the sixth commandment on my account, in addition to the eighth."

Lenox smiled tolerantly down from six feet of height upon his slim, fair brother-in-law.

"That temptation should be your own prerogative, my dear fellow, since
I am taking her from you for good."

Maurice laughed.

"Mon Dieu, yes. You have certainly given me a fair excuse to hate you. And I have wondered more than once, in the last three months, why one could not manage it."

"Too fatiguing for a man of your calibre!" the other answered with good-humoured bluntness. "You could never be bothered to keep it up."

"Ah, mon ami, you men who speak little speak to the point! You are altogether too discerning. But for Quita's sake, at least, we could never be otherwise than firm friends. With all my heart I wish good fortune to you both, and count the days to your return."

The two men shook hands cordially: and Lenox, beckoning the muleteer, lifted his wife into the saddle; thus averting a final demonstration. She waved her hand to a blurred vision of her brother, smiling resolutely, till his back was turned: and he departed townward;—a lonely brown figure, to which a slight stoop of the shoulders lent an added air of pathos.

Quita sat looking after him, her stillness belying the clash of emotions at her heart.

That vanishing figure on the sunlit road stood for all that she knew and loved best in the world: for Art, independence, good comradeship: for the happy, irresponsible, hand-to-mouth life of Bohemia: for the Past, dear and familiar, as a well-loved voice: while the quiet man at her side,—whose mere presence suggested latent force, and gave her a sense of protection wholly new to her,—stood for the Future; the undiscovered country, peopled with possibilities, dark and bright. And Quita Lenox, being blest, or curst, with the insight and detached spirit of the artist, saw clearly that the Great Experiment held, for her, a large element of hazard; that she had staked her all upon a turn of the wheel, with what resulting Time alone could show.

Her husband's hand on her arm brought reflection abruptly to an end.

"He is almost out of sight now," Lenox said quietly. "And I think it's time we made a start. Will you come?"

She turned to him at once, with a smile whose April quality heightened its charm.

"Of course I will; and gladly. Don't think me horrid, Eldred. I have always been frank with you, haven't I? And . . . it is a wrench leaving Michael to live and work alone."

"I quite understand that: and I value your devotion to him for selfish reasons. It proves what you may be capable of feeling . . . for me, one of these days."

The mingled dignity and humility of his tone so moved her that her only answer was an impulsive pressure of the hand resting on her arm: and they went forward for a long while without further speech, the muleteer having set off for the summit by a series of short cuts known to his kind.

Before long massed pines were above and below them; their jagged stems and branches sharply imprinted on stretches of sunlit glacier, and on the pathway in mottled patches of shadow.

Eldred Lenox walked close to his wife, one hand resting on the crupper behind her. The man's intensity of feeling did not rise readily to the surface; and a certain proud sensitiveness, the cardinal weakness of big natures, withheld him from the full expression of an emotion to which she could not adequately respond. He was content to wait, and hope; and in the meanwhile, he walked at her side wrapt in the mere joy of possession; one of the strongest, yet least recognised passions of a man's heart. From time to time he glanced at her attentively; and each glance strengthened his faith in that which had come upon him, sudden as an earthquake, and no less subversive of ancient landmarks, of confirmed prejudices and convictions in regard to the woman element in man's life.

For Quita Lenox, though far from beautiful, in the accepted sense, was undeniably good to look at. Coils of soft hair, golden in the sun, brown in the shade; eyes neither grey nor green, intensified by unusually large pupils, and by brows and lashes almost black; a straight nose, low at the root; a mouth too long, too mobile for beauty, its emotional quality safeguarded by an uncompromising chin, completed a face whose charm lay in no particular excellence of details; but in the vivid spirit,—quick to see, to feel, to understand,—that informed and harmonised a somewhat contradictory whole. An abiding sense of humour, hovering about her lips and in her eyes, kept the world sane and sweet for her, and leavened her whole outlook on life. A minor quality completed her charm. By virtue of the French blood in her veins, she imparted, even to the simplest garments, an air of distinction, of exquisite finish, to which an Englishwoman rarely attains.

At three-and-twenty Quita Lenox was very artist, though not, as yet, very woman. The complex Ego, which is the keystone of Art, had not been tested and dominated by the great simple forces, which are the keystone of life.

But her husband was in no mood to analyse her appearance, or her charm. He wanted beyond all things to know what was passing in her mind, and because his own thoughts were too passionate for utterance, he waited for her to speak. But for the first time in his knowledge of her, he waited in vain. Protracted silence on her part was a phenomenon so unusual, that at length he turned to her definitely, a shadow of misgiving in his clear Northern eyes.

"Are you thinking over it all very seriously . . . now that it is done past undoing?"

He smiled in speaking, and she met his look with her accustomed frankness.

"And if I am . . . ? Surely that service gives one food for reflection. I had not so much as looked at it since early days when curiosity impelled me to read it through; and weddings have never been in my line. As a matter of fact, I was thinking just then what unaccountable creatures we men and women are! How we ponder, and debate, and fuss over trifles, and then plunge headlong past the big turning-points of life, without a thought of the consequences lurking round the corner. Which doesn't mean that you and I need spell our consequences with a capital C, or label them tragic in advance," she added with a laugh. "For honestly, it seems to me that a rising artist, and a rising explorer, both devout worshippers of the eternal hills, may reasonably expect to possess many ideas and interests in common: and those are the bricks out of which two people build their House of Happiness, n'est-ce pas, mon ami?"

"Yes; if you choose to leave mutual trust, and mutual devotion, out on the doorstep."

"I don't choose: only, they are not the bricks, Eldred. One is the foundation-stone; and the other,—the other is a great mysterious Something, that transforms the House into an enchanted palace. But we must be content to begin with the House,—do you see?"

"Yes—I see. I am abundantly content to begin on any terms."

Something in the man's tone impelled her to lean outward a little, so that her shoulder rested lightly against the arm passed behind her.

"You are much too good to me, dear," she said softly. "I don't think one could possibly live with you and fail to love you. That is why I have dared to take the risk."

He did not answer in words, nor did he give her the kiss she half expected; but his hand deserted the crupper, and the mule pricked a velvet ear at the check in his progress. Then Quita straightened herself, as if reasserting her cherished independence.

"After all, it is more interesting, in some ways, not to have everything cut and dried from the start," she went on, striking off at a tangent, with an innate perversity incomprehensible to a mere man. "It prevents a headlong fall into the commonplace: and there is a certain excitement in looking on, so to speak, at one's own personal drama, without feeling quite sure of its developments."

Lenox knitted his brows. He could not always keep pace with her more fantastic moods.

"Quita, are you talking nonsense?" he asked with a touch of irritation.

"No."

"Well, I wish you were. I don't like that sort of attitude towards serious things; and I don't understand what you mean about looking on at one's own life. It sounds brutally detached, not to say egotistical."

"That is because you only climb mountains and handle men, mon cher, instead of trying to paint them, or translate them into verse. You are spared the artist's complication of a dual personality; of two souls imprisoned in one body; the one who enjoys, and loves, and suffers; and the one who looks on, and picks every emotion to pieces. I am afraid the one you disapprove of has had the upper hand in me so far. Perhaps it is your mission to develop the other into a healthier state of activity."

"I hope to Heaven it may be," her husband answered fervently. "The present state of things strikes me as a trifle inhuman."

"But indeed I am not inhuman! Only . . . we have still a good deal to learn about one another, Eldred, although we are man and wife. You confess to an amazing ignorance of women; while my own varied experience of men has lain chiefly among 'the sayers of words'; and one can hardly class you under that heading!"

"Good Lord, no! I should hope not."

Quita threw up her head and laughed outright.

"Really, Eldred, you are delightful!"

"Glad to hear it," Lenox replied, a shade of sarcasm in his tone.
"It's the first time I have been accused of such a thing."

He quickened his pace; and she, divining a slight jar in the atmosphere, said no more. The supreme art in human intercourse is the art of punctuation, and in the long pause that ensued, silence accomplished her perfect work.

Higher up they emerged on an open space of roadway, where the pines came abruptly to an end; and the path shelved sheer from its broken railing to the Visp Valley below. Instinctively Quita drew rein and drank in every detail of the vision before her with the wordless satisfaction that is the hall-mark of the true Nature-worshipper. Lenox stood quietly at her side, his gaze riveted on her face. He had seen many mountains, giants among their kind; but never till now had he beheld the glory of them reflected in a woman's eyes. At that moment they seemed the only sentient things in a world of rock, and snow, and sunshine. It was as if the round earth, and the pillars thereof, had been made for them, and them alone.

Above the road a weather-beaten hut struck an isolated note of life, and across the valley Matterhorn towered,—solitary, superb,—his rugged head and shoulders thrust heavenward through a diaphanous scarf of cloud. Suddenly Quita Lenox fronted her husband, and his face softened to a smile that hovered in the eyes an appreciable time before it reached his lips.

"À la bonheur!" she said, smiling back at him. "We will break our journey here. You can tether 'Modestina' to that stump. I must do a rough sketch of this, and put in notes for colouring, while you sit beside me and smoke, and talk. When it's complete, I'll present it to you as a memento of to-day. Will that suit you?"

"Rather!"

He lifted her from the saddle, in defiance of her laughing protest, and, holding her at arm's length, looked long and steadily into her eyes, as though he would reach and capture, by force of will, the elusive spirit that lived in their depths.

It was in these rare moments of revelation that Quita was troubled by a disconcerting sense of exchanging false coin for gold. She tried to free herself from his grasp; and the colour deepened in her cheeks.

"Eldred,—let me go!" she said, with something less than her wonted assurance. "It frightens me when you look right into me like that."

"Frightens you? Dearest, . . . what nonsense!" But for once he disregarded her behest.

"It's not nonsense. It makes me see too clearly the chained-up forces hidden under that surface quietness of yours. I think you might be rather terrible if they ever broke loose."

He laughed abruptly, and let her go.

"I keep them chained up, I promise you: and they are never likely to do you any harm. Now, begin upon your picture, and don't alarm yourself about nothing."

She watched him thoughtfully as he led "Modestina" away, and tethered her to a pine stump. It needed small discernment to perceive that the equitable poise of his character rested upon the noiseless conviction that he was a man, and a gentleman: and it seemed to her that she did well to feel proud of her husband.

With which satisfying conviction she settled herself upon a slab of a rock, whipped out the sketch-book, that hung permanently in a flat leather bag at her waist, and plunged headlong into her picture. For in her case, impression and expression were almost simultaneous: the most distinctive quality of her work being the rapidity and certainty with which she produced her effects.

Lenox, returning, extended his firmly-knit length of figure on the sloping ground near by, and flung aside his cap; thus revealing more clearly the rugged contour of his head, and the black hair whose obstinate ripple no amount of brushing could subdue. With leisurely deliberation he filled his pipe, and surrendered himself to the enchantment of the hour, before it slipped from him into the region of accomplished things. And it is this very evanescence, this rainbow quality of our hill-top moments, that adds such poignant intensity to their charm.

Much of their brief courtship had been spent in such wordless companionship: the man smoking beside her, with, or without, a book, while she worked; and he never wearied of watching that abiding miracle, a picture springing to life under an artist's fingers.

"You're not likely to give up this sort of thing, I suppose?" he asked suddenly; and she turned upon him with blank astonishment in her eyes.

"Give it up? . . . You might as well ask if I shall ever give up seeing, or hearing, or feeling. It is a part of me. You don't want me to give it up, do you?"

"Far from it. I was merely thinking that it seems suicidal for an artist of your quality to bury herself alive in a little Frontier station, on the edge of a desert, more than a hundred miles from anywhere."

"Rubbish! It simply means a new range of subjects for my brush. Tell me a little about it, please. I like to try and picture things in advance; and I am lamentably ignorant about this remarkable Frontier Force, to which I now have the honour to belong. Are we all on the wrong side of the Indus, always?"

"Yes, for ever and ever; except when we get away on leave."

"And then we go camping and climbing in the far hills beyond Kashmir, don't we?"

"Yes, invariably! For the rest of the time we keep 'cave' along six hundred miles of heart-breaking Border country."

"In other words, you are watch-dogs guarding the gates of an Empire?"

"That sounds far more imposing; and it's no less true. We are also actively engaged in helping the Indian Government to cultivate friendly relations with the tribes at the point of the bayonet!"

"And don't the tribes respond?"

"Yes, vigorously, to the tune of bullets and cold steel; so that we manage to keep things pretty lively between us! Since we annexed the Frontier, nearly forty years ago, the Piffers have taken part in more than thirty Border expeditions, all told, to say nothing of the Afghan War."

Quita's attention had been diverted from her picture to her husband's face.

"You get your fill of fighting at that rate," she said, "And I think you must be rather magnificent when you are fighting, Eldred."

Lenox shrugged his shoulders, and laughed.

"I'm a keen soldier, if that's what you're driving at: and I believe the world holds no finer school for character than constant active service."

"I confess I never thought of looking at war in that light! But I can well believe it, if its horrors and hardships turn out many men . . . like you."

Words and tone set the man's pulses in commotion. But he clenched his teeth upon his pipe-stem, and ignored the personal allusion.

"Well, you can see for yourself, when you get there. Taking 'em all round, I think you'll find the Piffers as fine a set of fellows as you could wish to meet anywhere; and it's hard work, and hard conditions of life, that thrash them into shape."

"And the stations, where I am to be 'buried alive' in such good company?"

"I'm afraid the stations are the least satisfactory part of the programme. There are five of them along our north-west strip of desert; all more or less hopeless to get at. We play general post among them every two or three years, to avoid stagnation and keep the men fit. Just now my battery's quartered at Dera Ghazee Khan, a God-forsaken place, right down by Scindh. I don't know how I have the cheek to think of taking you there."

"But if I refuse to be left behind . . . ?"

"Well, of course . . . in that case . . ." His eyes, looking up into hers, completed the sentence.

"I'm not a 'society woman,' remember; and setting aside your companionship, I should prefer a 'God-forsaken place' on the Indian Frontier to St. John's Wood or Upper Tooting, any day! I am prepared to find it all very interesting."

"So you may, at the start. But the interest is likely to wear thin after the first few years of it."

"Well, perhaps by that time we shall have arrived at the enchanted palace, and then nothing else will matter at all!—There now; I've done all I can to my sketch for the present. Shall we go on?"

Lenox roused himself, not without reluctance, and they went on accordingly.

Towards the summit, trees grew rare: and they found the solitary hotel perched aloft, upon an open space; a hive of restless shifting human life, set in the midst of the changeless hills.

After a short interview with the manager's wife, they found themselves alone again, in the private sitting-room engaged by Lenox. A wood fire burned merrily in the open hearth, for September evenings are chilly at that altitude; and the windows, looking westward, gave generous admittance to a flood of afternoon sunlight.

Eldred, standing on the hearth-rug, surveyed all things in an access of silent satisfaction; while Quita moved lightly to and fro, frankly interested in details.

"Oh, how I love the cleanness and emptiness of these Swiss rooms!" she exclaimed at last. "They make one feel so unspeakably wholesome and good. And we are actually going to have dinner here, you and I? Just our two selves! How strange!"

On a sudden impulse she came close to him, and standing before him, took the lapels of his coat, one in each hand.

"Eldred, . . . I don't seem able to take it in at all! Other brides have so much of external paraphernalia to emphasise the fact they have closed one chapter of life, and begun another. But except for that dreamlike half-hour in church, you and I seem merely to have come away together for an everyday outing; and there is nothing anywhere, . . . except this,"—she lifted the third finger of her left hand,—"to make me realise that we are actually . . . married."

She spoke the last word under her breath; and almost before it was out, he had caught her to himself, and kissed her fervently, again and again.

"Does that help you to realise it a little better, . . . my wife?" he whispered; and for answer she drew in a long breath that was almost a sob. He released her at once; and as she faced him, flushed and breathless, he saw that tears stood in her eyes.

"Why, . . . why did you never . . . kiss me . . . like that before?" she asked very low.

"God knows I have wanted to, a hundred times," he answered. "But I think I was afraid you might . . . hate it. Why do you ask, though? Would it have made any difference between us if I had?"

"I can't tell; . . . oh, I can't tell! Only . . . you have been so restrained, so unlike an . . . ordinary lover, that I never dreamed it could mean as much to you . . . as all that . . ." She pulled herself together with an effort. "Now I am going to take off my things," she said. "Don't come, please. I want to get away by myself."

A moment later he stood alone, between the sunlight and the firelight, gazing blankly at the door that hid her from view; and wondering whether he had advanced or retarded matters by his unpremeditated flash of self-revelation.

II.

"A turn, and we stand in the heart of things."
—Browning.

When Eldred Lenox sailed from India six months earlier, he would have scouted as impossible the suggestion that he might bring a wife back with him on his return: and his uncompromising avoidance of women, from boyhood upward, had seemed to justify him in his assurance. But Nature is inexorable. She has her own methods of accomplishing those things that are necessary to a man's salvation; and behold in three months the impossible had come to pass. The giant Mirabeau was right:—"ce bête de mot" ought by now to be struck out of our dictionaries.

Lenox knew little of half measures: and, having succumbed,—in spite of himself, in spite of inherent prejudices and convictions,—he succumbed heart and soul. That which he had unduly scorned, he now unduly exalted. Only Time and the woman could lead him into the Middle Way, which is the way of truth. For beneath the surface hardness of the Scot lurked the fire, the imaginative force, the proud sensitiveness of the Celt: a heritage from his Cornish mother, whose untimely death had left her two younger sons in the hands of a bachelor uncle, of red-hot Calvinistic views. Their father—a man of an altogether different stamp—had met his boys on rare occasions, and ardently desired to know more of them: but an Afghan knife had ended his career before he could find leisure to complete their acquaintance. The history of Anglo-India is one long chronicle of such minor tragedies.

Thus fire-eating Jock Lenox had exercised iron rule over his charges, unhampered by parental interference: had reared them in an unquestioning fear of God, and an unquestioning distrust of more than half His creatures; had impressed upon them, in season and out of season, that woman was the one fatal element in a man's life, the author of nine-tenths of its tragedy, complexity, and crime.

Yet "one touch of Nature" had annulled, in three months, the work of twenty years. So much for education!

For a while Lenox stood motionless where his wife had left him, as though life itself were suspended until her return: for despite the glory of autumn sunshine, of leaping flames upon the hearth, the room, robbed of her presence, seemed colourless, dead.

Then, as the minutes passed and she did not reappear, restlessness took possession of him; sure sign that he was very deeply moved. He crossed to the open window, but even the colossal calm of the mountains failed to quell the tumult of passion in his veins. Her last words left him anxious. There could be no peace till he had interpreted them to his full satisfaction; and the power of interpreting a woman's words could not be reckoned among his attributes.

Suddenly it occurred to him that he had pocketed two unopened envelopes before starting for church. He drew them out; rather because he needed some definite occupation, than because he felt curious as to their contents. Men of his type are rarely overburdened with correspondents.

The first was a business letter. He read it with scant attention, and returned it to his breast-pocket. The second envelope bore the handwriting of his senior subaltern, now in England on short leave. The two men were close friends; but Eldred's last letter had been written four months ago; and the envelope in his hand contained Richardson's tardy response. He broke the seal with a smile at thought of his subaltern's astonishment when he should learn the truth. The letter was longer than usual; and in glancing through it hurriedly, the name Miss Maurice caught his eye. "Great Scott!" he muttered aloud; then, with quickened interest, began upon the second page, ignoring the opening.

"Wonder if you have run across the Maurices in Zermatt," wrote Max Richardson, with no faintest prevision of the circumstances in which the thoughtless lines would be read by his friend. "Artists both of them, brother and sister; and a rather remarkable couple, I'm told. She seems to have made a hit at the Academy; and the cousins I'm staying with are very keen about her. I happened to mention that I was writing to a chap in Zermatt, and they begged me to ask if you had heard or seen anything of this Miss Maurice. There's a bit of a romance about her; that's what has pricked their interest. Seems she was engaged to Sir Roger Bennet this season. A swell in the Art patron line. Lost his heart at first sight. But evidently on closer acquaintance found her rather a handful, and too much of a Bohemian to suit his British taste! At all events there was a flare-up over something about three months ago, and Sir Roger backed out, politely but definitely. It seems that Miss Maurice was a good deal cut up. Went off to Zermatt with her brother. And now rumour has it that she is engaged, if not married, to some other chap out there, I suppose by way of a gentle intimation to Sir Roger that he hasn't broken her heart. My cousins are eaten up with curiosity to know if it's true. Women appear to be capable of that sort of thing. But it strikes a mere man as playing rather low down on a luckless devil who has done her no harm: and I don't envy him his hasty bargain, or the repenting at leisure that's bound to follow. Lord, what fools we men are! And how easily we lose our heads over a woman! All except you—the Great Invulnerable, looking down upon our folly from the superior height of a snow-peak. . . ."

Lenox read no further. The last words enraged him, like a blow between the eyes, and set the blood hammering in his temples. It would seem, at times, that Fate selects with fiendish nicety the psychological moment when her arrows will strike deepest, and stick fastest. Thus, when his thirst was at its height, Lenox found the cup dashed from his lips; and that by the hand of his best friend:—a master-stroke of Olympian comedy.

With a curse he flung the letter on to the table.

Wounded love, wounded pride, and baulked desire so clashed in him that clear thought was impossible. He only knew that he had been deliberately deceived, the most intolerable knowledge to a man incapable of deceit: and with the knowledge all the natural savage in him sprang to life. If Richardson had appeared before him in the flesh, it is doubtful whether he could have stayed his hand: the more so, since he believed that the man had written the truth: that this girl—whom it seemed that he had wooed with quite unnecessary reverence—had taken the best he could give, and utilised it as a mere salve for her wounded vanity.

He understood now why her heart had proved more difficult of access than her hand. He had believed it unawakened; had dreamed, as lovers will, of warming it into life with the fire of his own great love: and lo, he found himself forestalled by this execrable man in England. Clearly he had been a fool;—an infatuated fool! He stabbed himself with the epithet: and a vivid memory of his uncle's stock cynicisms turned the knife in the wound. All the prejudices and tenets of his youth rushed back upon him now: an avenging host, mocking at his discomfiture; narrowing his judgment; blinding him to the woman's point of view.

And while he still stood battling with himself in a vain effort to regain his shaken self-control, the bedroom door opened, and his wife came quickly towards him.

His changed aspect arrested her: and the sight of her facing him thus, with the sunlight in her eyes and on her hair, her young purity of outline emphasised by the simplicity of her dress, so stirred his senses, that, in defiance of pride, the whole heart of him went out to her, claiming her for his own. But it is at just such crises that habit reveals itself as the hand of steel in a silken glove; and before she could open her lips, Jock Lenox had stretched out a ghostly arm from his grave in Aberdeen, and shut to the door of his nephew's heart.

Quita glanced hurriedly from the discarded letter to her husband's face.

"My dear, . . . what has gone wrong? You look terrible. Have you had bad news?"

The irony of the question brought a smile to his lips.

"Yes. I have had bad news. Read it for yourself." And he pushed the letter towards her.

"Why? Who is it from?"

"A friend of mine, in England, who seems to know a good deal more about you than I do."

"What on earth do you mean?" she asked sharply.

"You know well enough what I mean. Read that letter if your memory needs refreshing."

Her first instinct was indignant refusal. Then curiosity conquered. Besides, she wanted above all things to gain time: and while she read, her husband watched her keenly, with God knows what of forlorn hope at his heart.

But a twisted truth is more formidable than a lie; and intuition warned Quita that Lenox was in no mood to appreciate the fine shades of distinction between the literal facts and Max Richardson's free translation of the same. His frankly masculine comments fired her cheeks; and at the sight Lenox could restrain himself no longer.

"By Heaven! You care for that fellow still!" he broke out hotly. "And you had the effrontery to take those solemn words on your lips this morning, with the love of . . . another man in your heart!"

Quita Lenox, whatever her failings, lacked neither spirit nor courage.
She threw back her head, and faced his anger bravely.

"How dare you say such things to me? I . . . don't care for him. I—I hate him!"

"Proof conclusive. Indifference kills hatred. No doubt you wanted to convince yourself, and him, that you were indifferent; and to that end you must needs crucify the first man who comes handy. An admirable sample of feminine justice!"

"Eldred, . . . you have no right to speak like that. I won't hear you."

"I have every right; and you shall hear me. It was one thing to know that you could not give me all I wanted at the start. One hoped to set that right, in time. But to accept me because another man's defection had piqued your vanity, . . . God knows how you could dare to do it! I see now why you found me unlike an ordinary lover. No doubt that other fellow—curse him—took full advantage of his privileged position: while to me you seemed a thing so sacred that I hardly dared lay a hand on you. I might have known that a man who is fool enough to put a woman on a pedestal, is bound to pay a long price for his folly."

He was lashing himself more mercilessly than he lashed her: and in the torment of his spirit he did not pause to consider the possible effect of his words on a recklessly impulsive woman.

"Really . . . you are insufferable!" she retorted, her breath coming short and quick. "I have a little pride also; and you had better stop before you push me too far. For I tell you frankly, I don't care enough for you to stand this sort of treatment at your hands."

The counter-stroke stung like a lash. The lines about his mouth hardened, and he straightened himself sharply.

"Pity you were not more frank with me twenty-four hours ago. Then we might both have been spared this morning's ironical service. However, the thing is done now. . . ."

"Indeed, it's not done!" she flashed out defiantly. "I have no notion of being your wife on sufferance, I assure you. We are only on the threshold as yet. We need not go a step farther unless we choose. And after what you have said to me, . . . I do not choose."

For an instant the man was stunned into silence; then, in a desperate impulse, took a step towards her.

"Quita, . . . you don't realise what you are saying? Nothing can alter the fact that we are man and wife, now and always."

She motioned him from her with an imperious gesture.

"Don't touch me, please. I do realise, perfectly, that we are not free to make any more dangerous experiments. But we are at least free to live and work independently of one another. Of course I know that you can compel me to remain with you,"—her colour deepened on the words.—"But I know also that you have too much chivalry, too much pride, to force yourself upon me against my wish."

"By God, yes!" he answered from between his teeth. "And . . . what is your wish, may I ask?"

For the first time she hesitated, and lowered her eyes.

"I believe our wishes are identical," she said.

"No need to trouble about mine. You can put them out of court altogether."

His tone spurred her to instant decision.

"My wish is to go back to Zermatt at once, by the funicular; and . . . that we should not see one another again. I will accept nothing from you. I can earn my own living, as I have done till now. Thank God, Michael is too blessedly Bohemian to make a fuss, or be horrified at things. He will simply be overjoyed to get me back."

She turned from him hastily; and he stood, like a man paralysed, watching her go. On the threshold of the bedroom door she looked back.

"Don't think of writing to me, or of trying to patch up a reconciliation between us," she said on a softened note. "Mended things are never reliable. I can neither forget nor forgive what you have said to me to-day, and when you have had time to think things over, you will probably feel thankful that I had the courage to leave you."

The soft closing of the door roused him, and he sprang forward with her name on his lips. Then Pride gripped him; Pride, and the habit of self-mastery hammered into him by his redoubtable uncle. The fact that our spirits thus live and work, deathlessly, in the lives and hearts of those with whom we have come into contact, is a form of immortality too seldom recognised by man.

In the silence that followed, Lenox looked blankly round the empty room:—the room where they should have spent their first evening together. Then the irony, the finality of it all, overwhelmed him, and he sank upon the nearest chair. "What have I done? . . . My God, what have I done?" he breathed aloud. And it is characteristic of the man that, for all his grinding sense of injury, he blamed himself more bitterly than he blamed his wife.

His eye fell on the letter, which, had it contained a bombshell, could scarce have wrought more damage in so short a space of time. Tearing it across and across, he flung it into the fire, and derived a gloomy satisfaction from watching it burn. But though paper and ink were reduced to ashes, neither fire nor steel could annihilate the winged words, thoughtlessly penned, that had altered the course of two lives.

Footsteps in the bedroom brought Lenox again to his feet.

He flung the door open, expecting—he knew what.

An apathetic hotel porter was removing Quita's trunk: and nothing that had been said or done in the last half-hour had hurt him so keenly as this insignificant item:—the touch of commonplace that levels all things.

With a gesture he indicated his own portmanteau. "Take that also," he said, and strode out of the room.

At least he had the right to shield her from comment. To all appearance they must leave the place together! and he settled his account with the smiling manageress, adding simply: "Madame has had bad news."

He took a later train down the hill; deposited his trunk in a hotel bedroom; and spent his wedding-night under the stars; walking, ceaselessly, aimlessly, to deaden the ache at his heart.

Next morning he despatched half a dozen lines to Richardson disowning all knowledge of Miss Maurice's concerns: and three weeks later he sailed from Brindisi without seeing his wife again.

BOOK I.—AFTER FIVE YEARS.

CHAPTER I.

"I, who am Love, burn with too fierce a fire,
Even if I only pass and touch the soul,
Life is not long enough to heal the wound.
I pass, but my touch for ever leaves its mark.
I, who am Love, burn with too fierce a fire."
—Turkish Song.

Max Richardson lifted the "chick," paused on the threshold, and surveyed the empty room.

A bachelor's room, in a frontier bungalow, boasts little of beauty, less of luxury. The legend of Anglo-India—"Here to-day, and gone to-morrow"—is visible on its nail-disfigured walls, battered camp chairs and tables, supplemented by chance purchases from the "effects" of brother officers, retired, or untimely hurried out of "the day, and the dust, and the ecstasy."

To the observer for whom one hint of human revelation outweighs in value a warehouseful of inexpressive furniture, a room of this type holds one superlative interest. It is an index of character no less infallible than its owner's face. Its salient features may tell the same tale as a dozen others in the same station—the tale of a soldier going to and fro in a land of unrest. But its minor details reveal the man beneath the uniform.

There is as much individuality after all in a soldier as in any other specimen of God's handiwork; even though tradition and the War Office compel him to an external suggestion of having been turned out by the dozen.

The ramshackle room whereon Eldred Lenox had set his seal differed in one notable respect from others of its type. It contained no picture either of a woman or a horse. The dingy white wall was relieved by groups of barbarous weapons—Thibetan daggers, a pair of wicked-looking kookries, the jezail and Brown Bess of Border tribesmen, and the murderous Afghan knife, whose triangular two-foot blade has disfigured too many British uniforms.

In peaceful contrast to these trophies were one or two rough sketches of the mountain regions beyond Kashmir; desolate stretches of glacier and moraine, or groups of stately peaks, the colouring washed in with a singular sureness of touch. There were also maps, finely executed by hand, of Thibet and Central Asia. To these fresh names and markings were added, from time to time, with a thrill of satisfaction only to be gauged by the man for whom the waste places of earth are a goodly heritage, and who would sooner contribute a new name to the world's atlas than rule a kingdom. Higher up the twenty-foot walls, heads of sambhur, markor, and the lesser deer of the Himalayas showed dimly in the light of one lowered lamp. Skins of bear and leopard, and one or two costly Persian prayer-rugs, partially hid the groundwork of dusty matting, taken over with the bungalow from its former occupant, and in places revealing the stone floor beneath. The broad mantel-shelf was given over to books, a motley crowd in divers stages of dilapidation. 'The Master of Ballantrae' shouldered 'The Queen's Regulations,' one would fancy with a swaggering hint of scorn; a battered copy of the 'Pilgrim's Progress' stood resignedly between Bogle's 'Mission to Thibet' and a technical handbook on Topography, the whole row being propped into position at one end by a great brown tobacco-jar, and at the other by a bronze image of the Buddha in cross-legged meditation—a memento of Lenox's latest expedition to Thibet.

The solitary lamp, its green shade set at a rakish angle, stood upon a spacious writing-table, strewn with closely written sheets of foolscap, pens, pencils, pipes, and books of reference, half a dozen of these last being piled on the floor, close to the writer's chair. It was the table of a man who leaves his work reluctantly, leaves it in such a fashion that he can take it up again exactly where he left off, without wasting precious time upon preliminaries.

On Lenox's bare deck-lounge a bull terrier, of powerful build and uncompromising ugliness, slept soundly, nose to tail, and on one of the costly prayer-rugs his Pathan bearer slept also. The deep, even breathing of dog and man formed a murmurous duet in the twilight stillness.

All these things Max Richardson noted, with a twinkle of amusement in his blue eyes. Every detail of the room spoke to him eloquently of the man he had not seen for a year. Since his departure on furlough the battery had changed stations, marching across sixty miles of sand desert from Bunnoo to Dera Ishmael Khan, familiarly known as "Dera Dismal," a straggling station a few miles beyond the Indus.

Richardson had arrived from Bombay late that evening, just in time to change and hurry across to the station mess. To his surprise Lenox had not put in an appearance at the mess table, and Richardson, anticipating fever,—the curse of frontier life,—had left early, inquired the way to his Commandant's bungalow, and now stood on the threshold, scarcely able to believe the evidence of his senses. Strange developments must have taken place during his absence, if Lenox—the woman-hater, the confirmed recluse—were actually dining out.

He approached the snoring Pathan and roused him, not ungently, with the toe of his boot. The native sprang up, fumbled at his disarranged turban, salaamed deeply, and finally stood upright, a splendid figure of a man, six feet of him, if his peaked turban were taken into account—hard, wiry, with aquiline features, grey beard, and eyes keen as a sword-thrust; a man without knowledge of fear, cunning and implacable in hatred, but staunchly devoted to the Englishman he served, who, in his eyes, was the first of living men.

"The Captain Sahib—where is he?" Richardson demanded in the vernacular.

"At Desmond Sahib's bungalow for dinner. By eleven o'clock he returneth. Your Honour will await his coming?"

"Decidedly."

Zyarulla turned up the lamp, and proceeded to set whisky, soda-water, and a tumbler among his master's scattered papers. Brutus, at the sound of a remembered voice, tapped the cane chair vigorously with his stump of a tail, without offering to relinquish the one comfortable seat in the room. Richardson sat down beside him, caressed the strong ugly head, and lit a cigar.

The Pathan withdrew, leaving him alone with the dog and the whisky bottle, from which he helped himself liberally. Then, drawing one of the closely written sheets of paper towards him, he fell to reading it with interest and attention. It was a minute geographical record of a recent journey through tracts of mountain country hitherto unexplored, a journey which had gained Lenox the letters C.I.E. after his name. Richardson, while failing to emulate the older man's zeal for wanderings that cut him off for months together from intercourse with his kind, was yet keenly interested in their practical outcome.

The stronger light in which he now sat revealed him as a big fair man, by no means ill-featured, his soldierly figure emphasised by the gunner mess-dress of those days, with its high scarlet waistcoat and profusion of round gilt buttons, in each of which twin flames winked and sparkled. A suggestion of kindly, uncritical contentment with things in general pervaded his face and bearing. The blue eyes were rarely serious for long together; the mouth, under a neatly trimmed moustache, showed no harsh lines, no traces of past conflict. Had the great Overseer of men's destinies not seen fit to guide him to the Frontier, out of reach of demoralising influences, it is doubtful whether he would have escaped the trail of the petticoat, the snare of the grass-widow in determined search of amusement. As it was, he had passed through the critical twenties with a clean defaulter sheet; had established himself as a good soldier and a good comrade, a "friend-making, everywhere friend-finding soul," and the closest among these was the Commandant of his battery—a wholesome and pleasant state of things for both.

He was beginning to weary of geographical detail, when steps sounded in the verandah, and he was on his feet as Lenox came in.

"Hullo, Dick! Good man to wait for me! Thought I should have seen you before mess, though. What do you mean by not coming here straight?"

"None of my fault, old chap. We were delayed as usual crossing that blamed old Indus. Stuck on a sandbank for over an hour. Gives a fellow time to count up his sins and renounce the devil, eh? Expected to find you at mess, of course. I wasn't prepared for this sort of upheaval in the natural order of things!"

Lenox stooped to caress Brutus, who was urgently demanding attention.

"Upheavals belong to the natural order of things," he said quietly. "The world would come to a standstill without them. Light a fresh cheroot, and fill up."

He indicated the chair vacated by Brutus, sat down by the writing-table, and picking up a pipe proceeded to clean it out with scrupulous care. Richardson watched him the while, his face grown suddenly thoughtful. Once he leaned forward, as though he had some urgent matter to communicate, but apparently changed his mind, and spoke conversationally between puffs at his cigar.

"Zyarulla said you were at the Desmonds. Is that the cavalry Desmond, the V.C. chap, whose wife was shot by a brute of a Ghazi four years ago?"

"Yes;—a hideous affair. Yet, in the face of his second marriage, one can hardly call it a misfortune. It was one of those evils that had far better happen to a man than not—that's a fact; and there are a good many such on this amazing planet."

"Sounds a bit brutal, though, when the murder of a man's wife is in question."

"Facts are apt to be brutal; even facts relating to the holy estate of matrimony!" Lenox's tone had an edge to it, and Richardson somewhat hastily shifted to another aspect of the subject.

"You are really intimate with these Desmonds,—both of them?"

"Yes. Both of them. I dine there about once a-week, just myself and Desmond's inseparable pal, Wyndham, who is over there most days. You must call at once. She is Colonel Meredith's sister, a magnificent woman in every way."

"A miraculous one, I should say, to have dragged such an adjective out of you!"

Lenox smiled. "No. Only one of the right sort. The sort that makes fine sons. She has one already; splendid little chap. The three of 'em are off to Dalhousie early in May, and they have just persuaded me to spend my two months there instead of beyond Kashmir. Mrs Desmond has a misguided notion that I am knocking myself to bits over my work in the interior."

"Deuced sensible woman!" laughed Richardson. "It'll give me the greatest pleasure in life to shake hands with her."

"Come and do it to-morrow then. I'll go along with you."

While he talked Lenox had filled a long German pipe with a bowl of generous dimensions. Now he set a match to it, and as the first blue clouds curled upward a peculiarly aromatic fragrance filled the room.

"That stuff of yours is A1," Richardson remarked, with an appreciative sniff. "Pretty costly, I suppose?"

"Yes. My one extravagance. A special brand that I get out from home, a big batch at a time. Nothing like it for settling a man's nerves in the small hours."

"Do you still sit up over that sort of thing till the small hours?"

"Yes, most nights. What moonshine are you bothering your head about now?"

"Strikes me that sleeplessness of yours must be becoming serious. You look several degrees less fit than you did a year ago, and that's saying a good deal."

Lenox took his pipe from between his teeth, and regarded his subaltern steadily for a few seconds.

"When I need medical advice I'll send for Courtenay," he said, a hint of authority in his bantering tone. "We were discussing tobacco, and a woman; and the conjunction reminds me of an inspired German proverb I happened on the other day. 'God made man first; then He made woman; then He felt so sorry for man that He made—tobacco.' Supreme, isn't it?"

Lenox chuckled with keen appreciation over the characteristically
Teuton bit of cynicism, and Richardson laughed aloud.

"Rather rough on woman, that. You might almost have originated it yourself."

"Wish I had. I'd be proud of it. Stick to tobacco, Dick, and you'll never be tempted to blow your brains out. You may take my word for it, that jar of Arcadian mixture," he specified it with his pipe-stem, "is worth all the women in creation put together."

The bitterness that of late years had so puzzled and distressed his friend sounded again in his tone, and the laughter went out of Richardson's eyes.

But Lenox, absorbed in his own reflections, noticed nothing.

"Let's hear what you've been doing with yourself at home, Dick," he said suddenly. "You're not coherent on paper. I want a few facts. You went abroad latterly, didn't you? Toboganning, and that sort of thing, I suppose?"

"Yes; went with those cousins I told you of—to Zermatt."

"Delectable spot," Lenox remarked drily, his eyes on the bowl of his pipe. "Hope you enjoyed yourself there?"

"Yes, rather so. Had a rattling good time." Then he leaned forward again, elbows on knees. "Look here, Lenox, old chap; I'm no hand at skirting round a subject, and I feel bound to tell you that I know now . . . what happened there five years ago."

Lenox started so violently that the pipe dropped from his hand. A minimum of sleep and a maximum of tobacco do not tend to steady a man's nerve.

"How the devil d'you come to do that?" he asked, picking up his fallen treasure, and readjusting its contents.

"Well, you see, I happened to be with my cousins when they found out about it. Queer what a deal of trouble some women will take just to satisfy a bit of curiosity."

"Damn their curiosity!" Lenox muttered between his teeth, adding something hastily, "You can spare me the details. Nothing stands a chance against a woman's passion for other people's affairs. Very straight of you to speak out at once. Don't allude to it again, though;—that's all."

"But, Lenox," Richardson persisted, not without misgiving, for it is ill work tampering with the reserve of a Scot, "there's just one question I want to ask you, and I think I have a right to know the truth. I remember writing a certain letter to you that autumn; a rather disparaging letter about—Miss Maurice." The name tripped him up, and he reddened. "I beg your pardon; I ought to say Mrs Lenox, though she still paints under the other name."

"Say Miss Maurice, then, by all means," Lenox answered coldly. "She is welcome to call herself what she pleases so far as I am concerned. Go on."

"I want to know when that letter reached you."

"On the afternoon of the day—I was married."

"Good Lord!" the other ejaculated blankly. "And all that I wrote of,—was it news to you?"

Lenox nodded without looking up.

"My dear fellow, for God's sake don't tell me that a thoughtless letter of mine was responsible——"

Lenox rose and went over to the mantelpiece. The full light on his face was more than he cared about just then.

"You asked for the truth," he said, in a hard, even voice, "and—you have made a clean shot at it. We separated that day. I have neither seen nor heard of her since."

A long silence followed this bald statement of the case. Max Richardson had no words in which to express the pain he felt. Brutus arose, and rubbed himself against his master's legs, as if dimly aware that sympathy of some sort was required of him, and the regular beat of the sentry's footsteps asserted itself in the stillness.

At last Richardson spoke. "Wonder you cared about shaking hands with me again after that."

Lenox came nearer, and took him by the shoulder.

"My dear good Dick," he said quietly, "don't talk rubbish; and oblige me by putting the whole affair out of your head. It's as dead as a door-nail. Has been these five years. After all, you were simply an instrument—a providential instrument," he added grimly—"in the general scheme of things." He paused for a moment; then returned to his station on the hearth-rug.

"You say she has been painting under her own name. Has she been doing much in that line lately?"

"Yes. She has made great strides. Her Academy pictures fetched high prices last year."

"I am glad of that."

The words were spoken with such grave politeness that Richardson looked up as if suspecting sarcasm. But the other's face was inscrutable. "Do you happen to know where she is at present?" he asked, after a pause.

"No. I believe she and her brother travel about Europe. They never came back to England. That's what made my cousins feel sure there was something behind."

"Yes, naturally." Then, with an abrupt return to his usual manner, he added, "Now, old chap, I'm going to send you packing, and get to work. Deuced glad to have you back again. Hodson's a slacker of the slackest. We shan't keep him up here much longer, I fancy. Border notions of work don't agree with his delicate digestion! See you again at early parade:—sharp up to time."

And as Richardson's footsteps died into silence, Eldred Lenox went slowly back to the writing-table.

The past five years had not dealt tenderly with this man of surface hardness and repressed sensibilities. The black hair at his temples was too freely powdered with silver, the lines between his brows, and about his well-formed mouth and jaw, were too deeply indented for a man of five-and-thirty. The whole rugged face of him was only saved from harshness by a humorous kindliness in the keen blue eyes, that had measured distance and faced death with an equal deliberation; and by a forehead whose breadth made the whole face vivid with intellect and power. He looked ten years older than the inwardly exultant bridegroom who had stood upon that sunlit road outside Zermatt, waiting to take possession of the woman he had won.

The attempt to relieve bitterness of spirit with the stimulant of incessant work, and the questionable sedative of tobacco strongly tinctured with opium, was already producing its insidious, inevitable result—was, in truth, threatening to undermine an iron constitution while failing conspicuously to achieve the end in view.

After sitting for twenty minutes before a blank sheet of foolscap, Lenox gave up all further effort at mental concentration. A nostalgia of vast untenanted spaces was upon him,—of those great glacier regions where a man could stand alone with God and the universe, could shake himself free from the fret of personal desire. And he had agreed to forgo this—the one real rest and refreshment life afforded him,—to "suffer gladly" the insistent trivialities of hill-station life, merely, forsooth, because a woman had asked it of him. He anathematised himself for an inconsistent weak-minded fool. But he had no intention of breaking his promise to Mrs Desmond.

Since work was out of the question, he pushed his chair back impatiently, left the table, and flung out both arms with a gesture of desperate weariness. Yet sleep was far from him, and he knew it; unless he chose to induce it by the only means ready to his hand.

And to-night he did so choose. In general he had steeled himself to resist the temptation to smoke no more than was needed to quicken and clarify thought. But the short talk with Richardson had set all his over-strained nerves on edge. His sum of sleep in the past week did not amount to twenty-four hours, and for once in a way oblivion must be purchased at any cost.

Going over to the tall tobacco-jar that supported his library, he refilled his pouch with cool deliberation, stretched himself out upon the deck-lounge, and smoked pipe after pipe, till the portion of the drug contained in each accumulated to a perceptible dose. Then the great Dream Compeller took pity upon him, deadening thought, feeling, consciousness itself, till the pipe fell from between his fingers,—and he slept.

CHAPTER II.

"And, at each turn, it seemed as though
Fate some huge net round both did throw
To stay their feet, and dim their sight."
—W. Morris.

Three weeks later, on a diamond-bright morning of early May, Eldred Lenox was in the saddle, riding at a foot's pace along a strip of a path that links the Strawberry Bank Hotel with Dalhousie's central hill. Brutus trotted soberly to heel, while Shaitan—a black Galloway, half Biluch, half Arab—tossed an impatient head, sneezed several times in succession, and generally declared his intention of taking matters into his own hands, so soon as he should reach the broader expanse of Terah Mall. But Lenox, impelled by an inbred desire to climb, was minded to push on to the higher, emptier levels of Bakrota—the great hill that towered, formidable, directly ahead of him. For the chalet-like dwellings of Dalhousie are scattered sparsely over three hills, Bakrota, Terah, Potrain; and the summit of the last and lowest is crowned by Strawberry Bank Hotel, mainly the resort of captains and subalterns from the four plains stations of the district, doing their two months of signalling, Garrison Class, or of unadulterated loafing, as the case may be.

Lenox himself came under none of these headings. The man had a trick of refusing to be classed collectively, soldier though he was; a trick of isolation, inbred, unconscious, the outcome, perhaps, of much solitary wandering, of intimate association with the uttermost hills. It was as if they had imparted to him something of their own ruggedness, their aloofness, their stoical power of endurance.

A cheery little breeze stirred the branches of horse-chestnuts and rhododendrons, tossed the silver-backed foliage of the ilex, and set the cedar boughs swaying with slow, dignified indolence. Hidden within their depths of shadow, birds and monkeys twittered and chattered; and at intervals there came to Lenox the peculiar long-drawn note with which the hill villagers call to one another across the valleys. An infectious spirit of jubilation pervaded the air. The sun himself, in these cheerful latitudes, is transformed from an instrument of torture to the golden-locked hero of Norse and Greek legend; and with every step of the ascent Lenox felt the blood course more swiftly through his veins.

Ilex and rhododendrons, clustering close to the road's edge, shut off the vast prospect on his left; till, at an abrupt turn of the road, they gave place to a watercourse, descending in a cataract of boulders to the valley below. Then the glorious company of the mountains sprang suddenly into view, lifting scarred heads to heaven, and greeting the new day with a Te Deum audible to the spirit, if not to the ear itself. To the spirit of Eldred Lenox these outward symbols of the eternal verities, fit emblems of the stern faith in which he had been reared, spoke with no uncertain voice; and their message was a message of aspiration, of conquest, of the iron self-mastery and self-restraint indispensable to both. They reminded him, also, that life held many good gifts in atonement for the one gift denied; that a man might do worse than live and work unhindered by the volcanic forces of passion.

The past five years had, after all, been years of fruitful service to the great country he loved; the three letters after his name assured him of that. And there remained much more to be done in the same direction; work that would make unstinted demands upon his energy and fortitude; work that must, in due time, force him to forget.

Arrived on the Mall, with its far-reaching view of valley and hill, and its outcrop of glittering granite, a word of encouragement set Shaitan into a smart canter that brought them speedily to the half-way corner, whence a densely shadowed road climbs upward to the great forest of Kalatope. The glimpse of sun-splashed path and red pine-stems drew Lenox aside from the open Mall; and horse and rider passed into the stretch of scented coolness at a brisk trot. The path, little more than six feet wide, was innocent of railing. But much riding in the Himalayas hardens the nerves to these tight-rope performances, which are part and parcel of life in the hills.

For a while they went steadily forward, well content; till, on rounding a sharp corner, Shaitan stopped dead, his forefeet firmly planted on the roadway, his sensitive ears thrust forward; and Lenox, who had fallen into an absorbing train of thought, found himself confronted by a sufficiently startling reality.

The path ahead of him was blocked by the unwieldy forms of five buffaloes, in charge of a naked brown wisp of humanity four feet high, armed with a no more formidable weapon than a pine branch stripped of its needles. But the crux of the situation lay in the fact that, between the fourth and fifth buffaloes an Englishwoman, in a brown habit, mounted on a restive chestnut pony, was in imminent danger of slipping off the road to certain death among the rocks and boulders below. For the chestnut had succeeded in wrenching his hindquarters outward, his heels were already over the edge, and his rider, leaning well forward, was applying whip and spur with a coolness and vigour that could not fail to excite the man's admiration.

It was a matter of seconds: Lenox could not stop to calculate possible risks. Buffaloes and herd-boy scattered right and left before his furious onset. A swinging blow from his hunting-crop sent two of the bulky beasts scrambling up the inner slope, while Brutus, who found the situation all that heart of dog could desire, sent a third crashing over the khud to the accompaniment of shrill lamentations from the terrified child in charge.

The whole thing passed in a flash; the pony, by a frantic but futile effort to right himself, had just sent a shower of loose stones rattling from under his hind feet, when Lenox, dismounting, gripped the cheek-strap with one hand, the other being occupied with his own reins.

A vigorous forward pull landed the chestnut, panting and quivering, with all four feet on terra firma. But the rider's right arm had fallen limply to her side, and Lenox, looking up, for the first time, into a face deeply shadowed by a wide-brimmed helmet, recognised . . . his wife.

Her breath was still coming In small, quick gasps; but there was no shadow of fear in her eyes; no lightest tremor about her close-set lips.

"Great God! You!" he ejaculated under his breath, and involuntarily took a backward step away from her.

At the shock of their encountering glances her cheeks flamed, and she lowered her lids.

"I suppose I may say thank you for that," she said, and her voice shook ever so little. "A minute later, I should have gone over."

He nodded, keeping his teeth close, his eyes down; and a deadweight of silence fell between them.

Small sounds became suddenly self-assertive. The rustle of squirrels along the pine-stems, the monotonous music of the cuckoo, varied by a charge of toy pistol-shots when an inexperienced monkey alighted on a dead twig. Brutus, standing squarely between them, eyed each in turn with critical speculation, his ugly head cocked very much to one side. He instinctively mistrusted all wearers of petticoats, and had found the buffalo incident very much more to his taste.

At length, in desperation, Quita made a movement as if to pass on. But
Lenox laid a peremptory hand upon her bridle.

"Tell me, how do you come to be here of all impossible places on earth?"

His voice was harder than he knew, and a slight shadow passed across her face.

"Is it really necessary to explain?" she asked, coldly.

He relinquished her bridle at that.

"As you please, of course. Only—it is a little awkward our being here together; and it might be as well to come to some sort of understanding before we separate. Are you up here for the season?"

"Yes, we have been up all the winter, Michael and I, except for two months at Lahore. When the snow melted we moved to the highest cottage on Bakrota. It is beautiful up there. We came out here eighteen months ago," she went on a trifle hurriedly, grateful, now that the ice was broken, for the relief of commonplace speech. "I had heard a good deal about India, you know. I wanted to see it for myself, and if possible put a little of it on canvas."

"And you are not disappointed?"

"No, indeed. It is wonderful beyond words."

They had themselves well in hand now. Each had given the other a false impression at the start, and when two people are living at cross-purposes it is easier to move mountains than to remove that most intangible of all barriers, a false impression.

"And are you—up for the season?" Quita added, after a pause, with a natural touch of hesitancy.

"No. Two months' leave. I am free, therefore, to go elsewhere, if my presence here is in the least degree . . . annoying to you."

"Oh, but that would be a pity. You must have had a special reason for choosing Dalhousie."

"Some friends of mine were coming up, and asked me to come too. But they will quite understand if I say I should prefer to go shooting beyond Chumba."

"Don't say it, though, please. I would really rather you did not put yourself out in the smallest degree on my account. Besides," she added, achieving a rather uncertain smile, "we need not meet often, and no one—except Michael—will have any notion of . . . the truth."

"Of course not," he agreed, with glacial dignity. "I was forgetting that you had—discarded my name."

Again the blood flew to her cheeks.

"It seemed the simplest way to avoid possible complications, or unnecessary lies."

"And you flung away—my ring also?"

The question came out in spite of himself, for he had noted her ungloved left hand.

"No. Only I could not very well wear it—under the circumstances."

He stood aside now to let her pass. He himself then mounted, and followed her along the narrow path, raging against the irony of circumstance, as a man bites upon a sore tooth.

On reaching the spaciousness of Bakrota Mall, he had no choice but to ride abreast of his companion. He did so without remark, and since Quita lacked courage to spur her pony to a canter, they continued to ride thus for a time; each, under an admirable mask of composure, painfully aware of the other's presence.

Speech seemed only likely to widen the gulf between them, and at all times Lenox had a large capacity for silence.

Not so Quita. The last ten minutes had been overcrowded with conflicting emotions; her husband's mute proximity got upon her nerves, and a setting of pine and mountain put a finishing touch to an already intolerable situation. She turned upon him at length, with a small gesture of defiance,—a well-remembered tilt of her chin that pierced him like a sword-thrust.

"Don't feel bound to escort me, please. I am constantly out alone. You may have a long way to go; and we need hardly play at polite conventionalities—you and I."

He glanced at her keenly for a second.

"Thanks; I am in no hurry. But—if you would prefer it?"

"I think it would be less—uncomfortable for us both," she made answer desperately.

"In that case, of course . . ." He gathered up his reins, and lifted his hat, "At least I am glad to have been of some small service to you," he added, quietly. And before her brain or lips could formulate an answer, he had cantered off and vanished round a shoulder of the hill.

CHAPTER III.

"Flower o' the clove,
All the Latin I construe is 'Amo, I love'!"
—Browning.

Quita drew rein and sat motionless for several seconds, looking straight before her.

"I wonder . . . I wonder very much," she mused, "exactly what one may infer from all that. Either he has superb self-control, or I have been wiped off the slate altogether. Most probably the latter."

Then she moved forward slowly, in a state of mind so complicated that, for all her skill in self-analysis, she could not unravel her own sensations. She only knew that she felt jarred through and through, and in a mood to give way to her most dare-devil impulses. But happily for her, no egregious piece of folly was ready to hand at the moment.

Her appearance in India was itself the outcome of an impulse generated by the arrival of two cheques, whose united figures took away her breath; and confirmed by the fact that Michael's relations with the inevitable woman of the moment threatened serious complications—for the woman. For Michael himself serious complications seemed out of all question. Frank Pagan though he was, he lacked, in a peculiar degree, the needful leavening of common clay. Love, as he knew it, was not inevitably based on passion. It was his imagination rather than his heart that took fire, and only under the influence of a dominant emotion did he appear to be capable of the highest achievement. Briefly, he was in love with Love, with that elixir of the heart that stirs the pulses, and quickens inspiration. The object loved stood second. But, so long as the enchantment held, so long as no new impression caught and whirled him in another direction, he honestly believed her to be supreme.

Hence complications, many and embarrassing, which went far to interpret Quita's inconsequent flittings from one continental town to another. For, although the younger by eighteen months, she was many years older in thought and character than her irresponsible brother; and in all matters of moment she took, and was expected to take, the lead.

The key to a perplexing character may often be found in the idiosyncrasies of its nearest and dearest; and this reversal of the natural order of things explained much in Quita that appeared difficile and contradictory; explained also her instant gravitation to Lenox, in whom she divined a supply of moral force, and the masculine spirit of protection, both strangely undeveloped in the brother she so devoutly loved. And if at times the uncongenial task of conscience-keeper, and general financier, coupled with complexities, arising from her own false position, had proved something of a strain upon her, Michael had never yet discovered the fact. She understood and shared enough of his Pagan spirit to accept his emotional aids to self-expression at their true value. Do what he might, she could not find it in her heart to be angry with him for long. He carried his fine crop of failings with a cheerfulness and assurance so engaging, that it seemed almost ungracious to be aware of them.

But there were moments when the woman in her rebelled, even to remonstrance, with small result; and when, at length, the arrival of two cheques coincided with Michael's announcement that a certain enamoured Countess obviously expected him to free her from the tyranny of an unloved husband, Quita had laughingly suggested India as an inviting means of escape from entanglements present and to come.

Half a night of meditation had sufficed to set her on the rock of decision. There were possibilities about India not to be named, even to her own heart. There were also empty spaces where white women would be scarce, and where Michael must learn to work without the spur of a fictitious stimulant.

Before the week was out, behold them ploughing through the Mediterranean, leaving the misguided Countess to pacify a suspicious husband. A summer in Kashmir, and a winter in a deserted Himalayan station, had confirmed Quita in the wisdom of their flight; and now her own unnamed possibility had been sprung upon her so suddenly, so strangely, that it took away her breath, and left her as yet neither glad nor sorry, but profoundly disturbed.

Arrived at her own turning, she relieved her feelings a little by getting Yorick at a canter up the twisted scrap of a path that climbed to a wooden doll's house, christened by a poetical Hindu landlord, the "Crow's Nest." Perched on an impossible-looking slope of gravel and granite, eight thousand feet above the Punjab, it seemed only to be saved from falling headlong by an eight-foot ledge of earth, which Quita spoke of proudly as her "garden," and which actually boasted two strips of border aglow with early summer flowers. Here she found her sais squatting on his heels; and springing from the saddle, dismissed Yorick without his customary lump of sugar.

On the steps of the trellised verandah she paused, nerving herself to recount her astonishing adventure in the right tone of voice, and instinctively her brain noted every detail of the view outspread before her. The golden stillness of morning rested on hill and valley like a benediction. Green cornfields, white watercourses, granite promontories, and black patches of forest—all were bathed in warmth and light without languor. The breath of the snows was still ice-cool, and exhilarating as wine; its freshness penetrated and enhanced by the faint sweet scent of Banksia roses, that clothed the rickety woodwork in a fairy garment of green and ivory-white. Each least sound was crystal clear in the rarefied air; the quarrelling of two sparrows, the high-pitched chatter from the compound behind the cottages, the crooning of ring-doves among the pines. Butterflies, like detached flowers, fluttered in and out. A faint breeze stirred the roses, so that an occasional creamy petal fell circling to the ground.

But for the first time Quita Maurice felt out of tune with it all. A disturbing element had thrust itself into her life, deranging its perspective, altering its values. She felt badly in need of common human sympathy, and the exalted calm of these high latitudes irritated rather than soothed her.

With an impatient sigh she turned to enter the house.

The glass doors of the centre room stood open, a characteristic room, half drawing-room, half studio; furnished mainly with two large easels, painting-stools, and cane chairs, yet bearing in every detail the stamp of Quita's iridescent personality. A pianette, a violin, a litter of music, and back numbers of the 'Art Journal' occupied one corner. A revolving bookcase showed an inviting array of books. Her own canvas was hidden by draperies of dull gold silk, and beside it, on a carved stool, sprays of Banksia roses and honeysuckle soared plumelike from a vase of beaten bronze.

Before the second easel Michael stood, with his back towards her, brush and palette in hand, head critically tilted, his velveteen coat sagging a little from rounded shoulders. Absorbed in his picture, he was quite unconscious of her presence. This irritated her also to an unjustifiable extent. Her vanity had suffered recent shock, and an unreasoning longing possessed her to be cared for, to be supremely needed.

"Michel!" she cried imperatively from her post in the doorway,—Michael objected strongly to the harsher pronunciation of his name; and the two seldom spoke English when alone. "Is it necessary to fire a salute before you will deign to be aware that one has come back?"

At that he turned quickly about, and treated her to a burlesque bow of apology.

"Mais non, chérie . . . a thousand pardons! But it is no fault of mine that you have the footfall of a bird!"

She laughed in spite of herself.

"Keep those sort of speeches for Miss Mayhew. She may possibly believe
them. It would be all the same if I had the footfall of an elephant!
Nothing short of siege-guns would distract your mind from that picture.
It has bewitched you."

"Eh bien! When it is complete it will be a masterpiece," he assured her loftily.

"No doubt! But, in the meanwhile, it may interest you to know that except for a genuine miracle, I should not be here at all."

"Mon Dieu! But what happened? Tell me."

Flinging aside palette and brushes, he caught her hands in his, and it cost her an effort to preserve her lightness of tone.

"Nothing blood-curdling, since you see me without bruise or scratch. Only Yorick and I got tangled up with a herd of buffaloes on the Kajiar Road. In his fright, the little fool slipped half over the khud, and if a knight-errant had not fallen from heaven, in the nick of time, we should both be lying somewhere in the valley by now, 'spoiling a patch of Indian corn'!"

Maurice frowned. "Don't be gruesome, Quita."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to be. I was only quoting that uncannily clever Kipling boy at Lahore. Yorick and I were slithering over, just like the loathly Tertium Quid on the Mushobra Road; and there is plenty of Indian corn in the valley! I thought of it, all in a flash, and it wasn't enlivening, I assure you."

"That is enough," Maurice protested hastily. Tragedy oppressed him to the verge of annoyance. "But tell me—who was the knight-errant, that I may at least shake hands with him."

The blood tingled in Quita's cheeks, and she went quickly forward into the room.

"I doubt if you will want to do that when you know his name," she said.
"It was—Captain Lenox."

"Nom de Dieu! That fellow!" Michael flung out his hands with a dramatic gesture of despair. "What is he doing here, par exemple, instead of poking about among his glaciers? Now I suppose he will not rest till he has taken you from me again."

The frank selfishness of the man's first thought was so characteristic that Quita smiled. But her smile had an edge to it.

"Set your mind at rest on that point," she said. "He is no more anxious to claim—his property, than I am to be claimed."

"Curse him! Did he dare to tell you so?"

Quita lifted her head; a spark of anger flashed in her eyes.

"You seem to forget that he is a gentleman, and—my husband." Then, recovering herself, she added more gently, "There are ways and ways of telling things, mon cher, and since I have relieved your anxiety, we need not mention him again. The subject is distasteful to me. Now, I want to see how you have got on with the masterpiece!"

She went to the easel; and Maurice, following, stood at her elbow anticipating the sweet savour of praise. For the picture was a notable bit of work, daringly simple in colouring and design, yet arresting, convincing, alive.

It represented a young girl, with the promise of womanhood on her gravely sweet lips, and in the depths of her eyes, half-sitting upon the crossed rails of the verandah. An ivory-white dress of Indian silk fell in shimmering folds to her feet. A dawn of clear amber made a tender background to the dull gold of her hair. Trailing sprays of the rose that ran riot over the house drooped towards her; and a pine branch, striking in abruptly, made an effective splash of shadow in an atmosphere palpitating with the promise of fuller light. The only intense bit of colour in the picture was the violet blue of Elsie Mayhew's eyes—eyes that looked into you and through you to some dream-world unsullied by the disconcerting realities of life, which seemed only awaiting the given moment to rush in and dispel the dream. For, as the sky gave promise of fuller light, so did the girl's spirit seem hovering on the verge of fuller knowledge.

Such at least was Quita's thought, as she stood silently appraising her brother's work; and it brought a contraction to her throat, a stinging sensation to her eyeballs.

"I congratulate you, Michel," said she softly. "You have never done anything to equal that. It is more than a portrait. It is an interpretation, or will be, when it is complete. Her hopeless little 'Button Quail' of a mother won't understand it in the least, but Colonel Mayhew will. I wonder if you know yourself how much you have put into it?"

"I know that I have put some superlative workmanship into it," he answered, looking upon the creation of his hand and brains with critical grey-green eyes, curiously out of keeping with an ill-formed and unrestrained mouth.

"Indeed you have. The thing is full of atmosphere, and your flesh tints are worthy of Perugino. You mean to give it to her?"

"Cela va sans dire. She wants it as a present for her father."

"Why not hang it first, at Home?"

"Afterwards, perhaps. If she permits."

"It is a big gift, Michel. It would fetch a high price; and we need money."

Michael shrugged his shoulders with all an artist's scorn of "the common drudge."

"Since when have you turned commercialist, petite soeur? If it is a question of starving, I can always paint another. I do not sell this one, voilà tout. If it were only mine, I would have five lines of Swinburne under it for title. They express her to perfection. Listen—

'Her flower-soft lips were meek and passionate,
For love upon them like a shadow sat,
Patient, a foreseen vision of sweet things,
A dream with eyes fast shut and plumeless wings,
That know not what man's love or life shall be.'"

On the last line his voice deepened to an impassioned tone that brought an anxious crease to Quita's forehead.

"I wonder which you are most in love with," she said on a forced note of lightness. "The girl herself, or your picture of her? Do you ever treat her to such rhapsodies in the flesh? They must be a little embarrassing for a child of twenty!"

"Your 'child of twenty' is already very much a woman, and I have the right to say to her what I please."

"Not altogether, mon ami—unless——"

But Michael dismissed criticism as serenely as he dismissed consequences. The episode of the Countess was as though it had never been.

"I have no concern with 'unless.' Such uncomfortable words are wiped out of my vocabulary. They affect me like a false note in music."

Quita laughed. "No one knows that better than I do! But speaking simply as a woman, I know also that the man who opens our eyes to the passionate side of things involves himself in a big moral responsibility. And even you cannot shelve the moralities altogether."

"Dela dépend. If the moralities hamper one's art, the shelf is the best place for them in my opinion."

His sister did not answer at once. Michael's confession of faith was not a matter to be lightly dismissed; for the simple reason that he lived up to it in so far as human inconsistency will allow any man to live up to his faith, however ignoble.

"I sometimes wonder whether one's art really does gain by that form of freedom," she said thoughtfully, "or only—one's consuming egotism."

But the suggestion was rank heresy, and Michael would have none of it.

"Really, Quita, you are as enlivening as a Lenten service! Upon my soul, I'd sooner you turned vegetarian than developed a conscience! But believe me, I am devoted to Miss Mayhew. She is enchanting. A wild rose, half-open, with the dew still on her petals. Metaphorically, I am at her feet. Does that satisfy you, ma belle?"

"It might, if I had not heard a good deal of it before. You are chronically devoted to one or other of us, my beloved Pagan! That's the root of the difficulty."

In atonement for directness of speech, she laid hands upon his shoulders, and smiled very tenderly into his face.

"I am chronically devoted to you, coeur de mon coeur," he declared in all sincerity. "That is the only form of it I have yet known."

His reward was a butterfly kiss between the eyebrows.

"Out of your own mouth you stand condemned! It is quite charming for me; and for the rest—one accepts the unavoidable! But in sober prosaic truth, Michel, Elsie Mayhew is a great deal too good for you; and that nice Engineer boy, Mr Malcolm, is desperately in earnest about her, I have seen his whole heart in his eyes when he looks at her——"

"Mais, ma chère, what a serious derangement of his organism!" Michael broke in with irreverent laughter. "When all's said, the heart is a practical machine—even the heart of a lover, and a little of it must have been left below for pumping purposes!"

She stamped her foot in helpless irritation.

"Michel, how exasperating you are! Can't you see that I am in earnest?"

"Like my incomparable rival?" he queried unabashed. "Poor devil! I wish him no harm. Is it my fault, after all, if the lady prefers a man who is not cut out on a pattern, and filed for reference at the War Office? He is immaculate, ce cher Malcolm, from his parting to the toes of his boots. And, ma foi, he is clean—like all that redoubtable army of British officers—aggressively clean, inside and out, which one cannot always say with truth! But he has no finesse, no savoir faire where women are concerned. If he is in earnest let him try weapons more compelling than his beaux yeux. A man was not given lips and a pair of hands for eating and fighting merely; and if he cannot turn them to good account, he deserves the fate that will assuredly be his."

Quita's sigh, as she turned impatiently away, may have arisen from a passing thought of that other, who had also been remiss in putting lips and hands to their legitimate use, and had reaped disaster accordingly. She took off her helmet, as if suddenly aware of its weight, and tossed it into a chair.

"Is Miss Mayhew giving you another sitting after our sunrise picnic, on
Dynkund, to-morrow?" she asked in a changed voice.

"Yes, and I intend that she shall stay on for tiffin also."

"Then I will persuade Major Garth to follow suit, so that we may be a parti carré. And now, as it's more than half-past breakfast-time, we might begin to think about sitting down! I believe Major Garth is riding up this morning with some books I lent him, and I must get forward a little with my picture before he comes."

"His office hours seem to have become a negligible quantity lately,"
Maurice remarked casually, his eyes on Elsie's face.

"Yes, I told him so a few days ago, apparently without much effect. Major Garth is one of those men who combine a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of work with the capacity for securing good appointments, which is quite an achievement—of its kind. I suppose I must gently point out to him that now the station is waking up it would be well to consider the proprieties a little more than we have done so far; or the 'Button Quail' will be forbidding Elsie the house. She is volubly disapproving already, denounces him as a 'dangerous man' . . . delectable adjective! But the cackle of Quails is nothing to me. So long as the man behaves himself, and amuses me, I shall continue to see just as much of him as I think fit."

Major Garth, it may be mentioned in passing, had lately secured the coveted post of Station Staff Officer. He also had spent the winter months in Dalhousie; and he could by no means be reckoned among the men who fail with women through undue fastidiousness in regard to ways and means.

CHAPTER IV.

"A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter."—Eccles.

"Tired already? Nonsense! The air at this height is pure elixir vitae. It gives one a foretaste of the joy of being disembodied! I feel five years younger since I left the bungalow."

"And I, on the other hand, feel uncomfortably aware that I shall never see the forty-third milestone again!" And, seating himself deliberately on the trunk of a fallen deodar, James Garth looked up at his companion, where she stood above him on a rough-hewn block of granite, her alpenstock held high like a shepherd's crook, the slender, shapely form of her outlined upon a sky already athrill with the foreknowledge of dawn.

Standing thus, lightly poised, impatient of delay, slim and upright as a young birch-tree, a cluster of roses at her waist, her expressive face shadowed by the wide-brimmed helmet, she appeared triumphantly, girlishly young, for all her eight-and-twenty years. Her cheeks glowed; irrepressible animation sparkled in her eyes. The shock and jar of twenty-four hours ago seemed forgotten, as though they had never been, for Quita Maurice was blessed with the happy faculty of living vividly and exclusively in the present, and the exhilaration of ascent, the prospect of watching the world's awakening from a pine-crowned pinnacle, nine thousand feet up, were, for the moment, all-sufficing.

James Garth, in his upward glance, appraised every detail of her dress and person; savoured to the full her very individual—if, at times, thorn-set—charm. He was a connoisseur of woman—of their moods, their minor vanities, their methods of defence and attack—this man whose career had been mainly remarkable for a succession of sentimental friendship, innocuous and otherwise.

During the past air months he had spent an infinite deal of leisure in a pastime whose every move and countermove he knew by heart, and for the first time in eighteen years he had found himself out of his reckoning.

An element little known to him had upset the balance of power. He was beginning to be aware that, for all his unquenchable self-assurance, he had never for one moment felt sure of this woman, whose companionship was so accessible, and whose inner self stood always just out of reach, airy, impregnable, and by a natural sequence, the more entirely desirable. It had taken Garth some months to realise the truth: and on this morning of golden promise he decided that Quita Maurice must be made to realise it also.

Quita herself, meeting the eloquence of his eyes with that frank look of hers which had been largely responsible for the unprecedented turn of affairs, was vainly trying to repress a mischievous enjoyment of the fact that her companion was patently out of his element; that his drawing-room attitudes and demeanour struck an almost ludicrous note of discord with the untamed majesty of his surroundings.

Face, figure, and point-device attire, culminating in a buttonhole of freshly picked violets, stamped him as a man mentally and physically addicted to the levels of life; a soldier of carpet conquests and ball-room achievements. A brow not ill-formed, and a bold pair of eyes, more green than brown, suggested some measure of cultivated intelligence, without which Quita could not have endured his companionship for many hours together. But the proportions of his thick-set figure, and a certain amplitude of chin and jaw, bewrayed him; classed him indubitably with the type for whom comfort and leisure are the first and last words of life. The fact that he had ascended a matter of fifteen hundred feet before daybreak, and that with no more than the mildest sense of martyrdom, was proof conclusive that the balance of power had been very completely upset; and it is quite in keeping with the delicate irony of things that the one woman who had succeeded in upsetting it was, at that moment, dissecting him with the merciless accuracy of the artist.

"Poor man!" she remarked, sympathetically. "I'm afraid I have been treating you rather mercilessly; and you don't look particularly happy sitting on that deodar, either! I suppose I may consider it something of a triumph to have dragged a high priest of the arm-chair unprotesting up to the heights at this unearthly hour of the morning?"

"A triumph exclusively your own," he answered, with lingering emphasis.
"No other woman in the world could have achieved as much."

Quita glanced at him quizzically.

"I honestly wonder," she said slowly, "if you could reckon up at random how many times you have said that sort of thing before."

Garth reddened visibly; less at the justice of the retort than at the humiliation of being put out of countenance by a woman from whom he desired no less a gift than the gift of herself.

"Well, I never meant it fair and square before," he declared stoutly.
Whereat, to his consternation, she laughed outright.

"You seem to have a high opinion of my powers of credulity! That is too big a compliment for me to digest without salt! But I think we have talked nonsense enough for one while, and it's growing lighter every minute. Are you coming on? Or would you sooner sit there in peace while I push up to the top?"

The suggestion brought him to his feet.

"No, by no means. When I set out to do a thing, I go through with it."

"Rally your forces, then, for one more spurt of climbing. Time is precious. Can you really manage this formidable boulder, or would you like a hand up?"

She laughingly flung out her free left hand; and the mockery in her clear voice fired the man to make good his opportunity. He took prompt possession of the proffered hand, crushing it in his with unnecessary force, but made no attempt to scale the rock; while she, instantly perceiving his manoeuvre, sprang down to his side and freed herself with imperious decision. Then she turned upon him, her head held high, a spark of genuine scorn in her eyes; and he realised that he was dealing with no mere coquette, whose elusiveness might be taken as an inverted form of encouragement, but with a woman of character and spirit.

"Major Garth," she said in a tone of quietness more cutting than anger, "when I pay a man the compliment of going out alone with him, I take it for granted that he is in the habit of behaving like a gentleman. I should be sorry to find myself mistaken in your case."

Without giving him time to answer, she leapt lightly on to her deserted rock, leaving him to follow, if he chose.

And he did choose. For her scorn, while it stung his vanity to the quick, fired his lukewarm blood with a lust of conquest far removed from his usual cool-headed assurance at the critical moment. He seemed destined to experience more than one new sensation this morning; and new sensations rarely came amiss to this epicure of the emotions.

Being quite incapable of emulating his companion's chamois method of cutting corners, and striking out a direct line for the summit, he did not succeed in coming up with her till the arduous feat was accomplished,—the Pisgah height attained. Here he found her established on a slab of granite, hands loosely clasped over her knee, helmet tilted a little backward, forming a halo round her head and face. He arrived in a very unheroic state of breathlessness, and she greeted him with a frankly forgiving smile.

"That last bit came rather hard on you, I'm afraid. But surely all this makes ample amends."

She included in a wide sweep of her arm the superb panorama of hill and valley and far-stretching plain, robed in a haze of its own tierce breath, through which a silver network of rivers could be faintly discerned in the crescent light. Uprising from this blue interminable distance, the first crumplings of the foothills showed like purple velvet, and from these again the giant Himalayas—the "home of the greater gods"—sprang aloft, in a medley of lovely lines and hues, till they reached the uttermost north where the hoar head of Nanga Parbat soared twenty-five thousand feet into the blue.

Quita motioned her companion to another rock, a little distance behind her own.

"Sit down there, and recover your lost breath," she commanded, gently. "I would rather not talk for the present, if you don't mind. It would jar somehow. I daresay you understand what I mean."

He was many leagues removed from understanding: but he obeyed in silence, wondering at himself, no less than at her. And straightway Quita forgot all about him, in the mere rapture of looking, and of feeling in every fibre the incommunicable thrill of dawn.

A passionate nobility, freedom, and power breathed from the wide scene. Already a pearly glimmer pulsed along the east; already the mountains were awake and aware. Peak beyond peak, range beyond range, a shadowy pageant of purple and grey, they swept upwards to the far horizon, where the still wonder of the snows shone pale and pure against the dovelike tones of the sky. Away across the valley, where night still brooded, Kalatope ridge, serrated and majestic of outline, made a massive incident of shadow amid the tenderer tints around. The great hushed world seemed holding its breath in expectation of a miracle—the unconsidered miracle of dawn.

A Himalayan dawn is brief, as it is beautiful. One after one, the snow-peaks passed from the pallor of death to the glow of life. Then, sudden as an inspiration, the full splendour of morning broke, sublime as the eternity from which it came. Rapier-like shafts of light pierced the purple lengths of shadows that engulfed the valley. Threading their way through fir and deodar and pine, they flung all their radiant length across a rock-studded carpet of fir-needles and moss, and rested, like a caress, upon Quita's face and figure.

At last, with a long breath of satisfaction, she forced her sun-dazzled eyes and mind back to earth; only to discover that Garth had risen and was standing at her side. The man had seen and studied her in many moods. But never in one so exalted, so self-forgetful, as the present; and to the varied new experiences of the morning was added a wholesome sense of his own unworthiness to lay a hand upon her. In that illumined moment he was vouchsafed a glimpse into the temple of Love; a temple he had desecrated and defiled time and again; whose holy of holies he had never entered, nor ever could.

"Does it really mean as much as all that to you?" he asked, still watching her, with unusual concentration.

She nodded, and a soft light gleamed in her eyes. "Yes—as much as that, and more—infinitely more. One's cramped mind and heart seem to need expanding to take it all in."

Garth's smile lacked its habitual touch of cynicism.

"I am afraid even sunrise on Dynkund in your company has no power to lift me to such flights of ecstasy."

"I never supposed it had, you poor fellow! I wouldn't change souls with you for half a kingdom. Nearly every day of my life I thank the goodness and the grace that dowered me with the spirit of an artist. Think what a heritage it is to be eternally interested in a world full of people who seem to be eternally bored!"

"I suppose you include me in that noble army of martyrs?"

"Decidedly. It is one of your worst faults."

"At least I never commit it in your presence."

She laughed, and lifted her shoulders.

"At least you know how to flatter a woman! But, for goodness' sake, don't let's talk trivialities in the face of these stupendous mountains."

"And why not? In my opinion, the trivialities of a human being are worth more than the grandeur of a mountain, any day. But, seriously, Miss Maurice—if you can be serious with me for five minutes—does all this, and the Art in which you live and breathe, so satisfy you that you feel no need for the far better things a man might have to offer you?"

She frowned, and looked with sudden intentness at a distant, abject in the valley.

"Yes—seriously—it does. What is more, it seems to me that most men set too high a value on what they have to offer a woman, and that a good many of us are better off without it."

Garth set his teeth, and did not answer at once. That his first genuine attempt at a proposal of marriage should be thus cavalierly nipped in the bud was disconcerting, to say the least of it.

"But not you—of all women," he protested, incredulously. "Are you quite sure you understand what I mean? Won't you give me a chance to explain——?"

Her low laughter maddened him.

"Oh, no—please have mercy on me! Explanations are the root of all evil! If only people had not such a passion for explaining themselves, there would be fifty per cent fewer misunderstandings in the world. Don't you know the delightful story of a zealous mother reading the Bible to her boy, and explaining profusely to bring it within the scope of his small mind, and when she asked him, anxiously, 'Are you quite sure you understand it all, darling?' he answered, with the heavenly frankness of childhood, 'Yes, beautifully, mummy—except when you explain.' That's my feeling exactly; so we'll skip the explanations, if you don't mind."

He stifled an oath, and flung his half-smoked cigar down the khud.

"You're enough to drive a sane man distracted!" he declared hotly, and was not a little surprised at his own vehemence.

"No, no! That's exaggeration, I assure you. The strong wine of the morning has got into your head. Do be reasonable now, and keep personalities at arm's length. I detest them."

He moved away for a space; then, turning on his heel, came back again.

"At least you don't object to my companionship?" he said, ignoring her request.

"Of course not, so long as it amuses you to bestow it upon me."

"Amuses me! God in heaven, what makes you so hopelessly detached?"

"Some radical defect in me, I suppose. The Pagan strain, perhaps, that comes out so strong in Michael. I believe I am incapable of les grandes passions. But that does not prevent me from being a good friend, and a constant one, as you will find, if you care to test me in that capacity. Now you may sit down here," she patted her slab of rock invitingly, "and discourse about anything you please, except myself. Egoist though I am, I have had enough of the subject for to-day!"

And Garth—the man of surface emotions and ready tongue—found nothing to say in answer to this kindly but inexorable dismissal of his unspoken suit. He had no choice but to accept the inevitable, and the proffered seat. But the permission to discourse about anything he pleased left him dumb, and it was Quita herself who guided their talk into a less personal channel.

"Have you had any new arrivals at the Strawberry Bank lately?" she asked, conversationally; and the question was more relevant to the tabooed topic than Garth was likely to guess. He lived close to the hotel, and dined there when he felt convivially disposed.

"Yes; two new fellows came up this week. A doctor from Mooltan and a Gunner from 'Dera Dismal,'—the Thibet man,—Lenox, who seems to be making a reputation of sorts. But he looks a wreck. Smokes like a chimney; and is apparently working himself to death; a thankless form of folly."

"Perhaps. Yet India needs a few unsparing workers—like Captain Lenox."

She spoke with studied indifference; but her fingers were busy uprooting a patch of moss.

"Oh yes, India has a healthy appetite for unsparing workers! She is a grasping harridan, who demands all and offers nothing. She devours the lives of men who are foolish enough to lose their hearts to her, and wrecks their bodies by way of thanks."

Quita's lips lifted in the merest shadow of a smile. "Aren't you a little ungrateful to her? She has been fairly merciful to you!"

"I have never given her the ghost of a chance to be otherwise! I don't believe in overwork, plus the Indian climate. More men kill themselves by a happy mixture of both than the importance of their achievements justifies. I was chaffing Lenox only last night about his leaning towards that unrecognised form of suicide; and all the answer I got was that a man might die of a more degrading disease. You never by any chance get a rise out of old Lenox!"

"Do you know him well?"

"As well as it's possible to know a fellow who lives with all his shutters up. And in any case an anchorite, and a woman-hater, would never be much in my line. The symptoms appear to have developed in the last few years. Not without reason, as I happen to know."

"What do you happen to know?"

The question came almost in a whisper; but Garth, who had all a woman's weakness for other people's affairs, was too intent upon his ill-gotten scrap of gossip to observe his companion's slight change of manner.

"Why, that it's simply a case of cherchez la femme, as usual," he answered, lightly. "I believe it's a fact that he went so far as to marry one of these women he affects to despise, when he was on leave five years ago."

Quita started, and bit her lips. "What reason can you have for believing anything . . . so improbable?"

"My dear lady, marriage is never improbable. You women have a knack of tripping up the most unlikely subjects! In this case, I had the details from an old friend of mine. She happened to be stopping at the same hotel as Lenox at Zermatt. Then one morning he disappeared; and, as she had taken rather a fancy to him, she tried to find out what had become of him. After a good deal of questioning, it transpired that he had been seen coming out of the English church with a lady; and further inquiry revealed the fact that an officer named Lenox had been quietly married there the day before. Naturally, she scented a romance, and was keen to know more. But he seemed to have vanished outright. Then ten days later she met him on the station platform, travelling alone, and obviously down on his luck. He told her he was off to join his battery in India: nothing more. Problem: What, in the name of mystery, had he done with the lady?"

At that Quita rose abruptly, her cheeks on fire, her whole frame tense with suppressed agitation.

"Oh, stop—stop. I can't stand any more!" she protested, in a smothered voice; and at once Garth was beside her, contrite and amazed.

"Miss Maurice—what have I said to upset you so?"

"It's not your fault. You couldn't help it," she answered, without looking up. "But—you were telling me my own story!"

"Good Lord! Then—it was you?"

"Don't say any more, please. I never meant to speak; only—one had to stop you—somehow. It's time we went back to the others now. I am sure you must be wanting your breakfast. And remember"—she faced him at last, with brave deliberation—"I trust you, as a gentleman, never to speak of this again—to me, or to any one else."

And Garth bowed his head, and followed her, in a bewildered silence.

CHAPTER V.

"He that getteth a wife beginneth a possession; a help like unto himself, and a pillar of rest."—Ecclesiasticus.

Eldred Lenox stood alone in the Desmonds' diminutive drawing-room, patiently impatient for companionship more responsive than that of cane chairs and tables, pictures and a piano. Yet the room itself, with its atmosphere of peace and refinement, gave him a foretaste of the restfuluess that made Honor Desmond's companionship a growing necessity to this man, whose heart and brain were in a state of civil war. It was filled with afternoon sunlight, with the faint, clean fragrance of violets, wild roses, and maiden-hair fern, and its emptiness was informed and pervaded by countless suggestions of a woman's presence; a woman versed in that finest of all fine arts, the beautifying of daily life.

In this era of hotels, clubs, and motors, of days spent in sowing hurry and reaping shattered nerves, the type is growing rarer, and it will be an ill day for England's husbands and sons, nay, for her supremacy among nations, if it should ever become extinct. For it is no over-statement, but simple fact, that the women who follow, soon or late, in the track of her victorious arms, women of Honor Desmond's calibre—home-loving, home-making, skilled in the lore of heart and spirit—have done fully as much to establish, strengthen, and settle her scattered Empire as shot, or steel, or the doubtful machinations of diplomacy.

A half-acknowledged conviction of this truth was undermining Eldred's skin-deep cynicism; and it did not tend to alleviate his renewed sense of loss. A week had passed since his astounding experience on the Kajiar Road; a week in which the hours of sleep had been a more negligible quantity than usual; in which he had fought squarely against an imperative need to escape from the haunting consciousness of his wife's presence, and had been squarely beaten. His present need to see and speak with Honor Desmond was an ultimate confession of that defeat.

On reaching the bungalow, he was told that the Mem-sahib bad gone out with the Chota Sahib, but would doubtless be back before long, and had decided to await her return. During his ride with her that morning, he had not been able to bring himself to speak. But this time he intended to go through with the ordeal. He felt too restless to sit down; and she did not keep him waiting long.

Footsteps and low voices, punctuated with silver laughter, heralded her coming, and a few minutes later she entered, carrying a pocket edition of herself, who clung about her neck, and pressed a cool rose-petal cheek against her own.

Lenox had described her as a magnificent woman. A Scot may generally be trusted not to overstate his facts; and certainly Honor Desmond, in those radiant early days of marriage, deserved no less an adjective. Height, and a buoyant stateliness of bearing, lent a regal quality to her beauty. Her grey-blue eyes under very level brows were the eyes of a woman dwelling in the heart of life, not merely in its outskirts and pleasure-grounds.

She expressed no surprise at seeing Lenox again so soon. Come when he might, his presence was accepted as a matter of course; the surest way to put a man at his ease.

"So sorry I kept you waiting," she said simply, and the hand she gave him was at once soft and strong,—an epitome of the woman. "Theo was lunching out with Colonel Mayhew—they are both very full of that book of his on the Hill Tribes—and I have been devoting most of my time to this very exacting person!"

Lenox caressed the child's red-gold hair with a cautious reverent hand, and a contraction of envy at his heart.

"What a beautiful little chap he is! Begins to look an out-and-out
Meredith already. Desmond must be tremendously proud of him."

She smiled and pressed him closer.

"He is; and I'm nearly as bad! One son, three fools, you know! Poor little Paul, it's not fair to call him names when he can't hit back."

"You called him after Wyndham?"

"Yes. They're like brothers, those two. Now let me get rid of him, and we'll have a quiet talk till Theo comes back. Sit down and smoke, please."

He complied; and she, returning, established herself beside her work-table, and took up an elaborate bit of smocking without question or remark.

His trouble and stress of mind were very evident to her; but she was one of those rare women who are chary of questions—who, for all their desire to help and serve, never approach too near, or say the word too much, which was, perhaps, one reason why men found her so restful, and instinctively talked to her about themselves.

But Lenox was long in beginning.

By imperceptible degrees, this unsought gift of friendship was melting the morsel of ice at his heart; was reviving in him, against his will, that keen appreciation of a cultivated woman's sympathy and companionship, which, among finely tempered men, is as potent a factor in the shaping of destinies as passion, or hot-headed emotion.

For a while he permitted himself the bitter-sweet satisfaction of merely watching her where she sat, in a shaft of sunlight, that struck golden gleams through the burnished abundance of her hair; of noting the grace and dignity of her pose, and speculating as to the nature of her thoughts. His wife's reckless impulse on that fateful September day was bringing him now within measurable distance of a very human danger. The deep, passionate heart of him, crushed and stifled during the past five years, was in no safe state to be brought into contact with a lighted match. But of this danger he was, by his very nature, sublimely unaware.

Finally he took the short pipe from his lips and spoke.

"Of course you know I have something definite to say, or I should hardly have the cheek to inflict myself on you twice in the twenty-four hours."

She looked up and smiled. "You're evidently in one of your bad moods, or you would not vex me by putting it like that."

"Sorry to vex you, but I am in a bad mood; have been for the last week; so you must make allowances, I can't sleep, and a restless devil inside me won't let me settle to steady work. Nerves, I suppose. I don't look a likely subject, do I? But they give me a deal of trouble at times; and I came to say that I must go back on my arrangement with you and Desmond and clear out of this before the end of the week."

"Oh, but surely that would be a great pity; a great disappointment to us both. Is it really a case of 'must'?"

"I think so."

"And you have only been here a fortnight! Isn't it rather early days to give in?"

"Very early days—as the case must appear to you; and the evil of it is that I have no power to make things clearer. Think me an overwrought fool; a broken-backed corn-stalk, if you choose. It will hurt, of course; but it can't be helped."

He spoke with undisguised bitterness, and, laying down her work, she looked at him straightly, a great compassion in her eyes.

"You misunderstand the fundamentals of friendship if you can talk like that," she said gently. "It is rooted in reticence in respect for another's individuality. Whatever you choose to do, you may be very sure that I shall neither doubt your good reasons, nor seek to know them. That is my idea of what it means to be a friend."

"I stand rebuked," he answered gravely, "and I'm not likely to forget what you have said."

"At the same time," she added in a lighter tone, "one is only human! And I can't let you leave Dalhousie without a word of protest—even if it is useless." She hesitated. "May I speak straight?"

"As straight as you please. I should prefer it."

"Well, I think that if it is a case of nerves, or—worry of any kind, nothing can be worse for you than your own society. Such amusement as we can offer you up here may be frivolous and insignificant enough, but, believe me, it is far better for you just now than the most sublime snowfields and glaciers at the back of Beyond! You know you are free to come here whenever you please. Theo enjoys having you; so do I. And I'm sure it's good for you to fraternise with something more human than a mountain!"

He smiled, but did not answer at once; and suddenly she lifted her head, her face all animation.

"Look here, I have a notion—an inspired notion. Why should not you two get Colonel Mayhew's permission to go off on a week's shooting trip beyond Chumba. Ten days if you like. Theo would love it. You would come back to your writing like a giant refreshed. There now, isn't that a plan worth thinking over?"

Moved beyond his wont, Lenox leaned impulsively towards her.

"My dear Mrs Desmond, your kindness overpowers me. But I really can't see that you and your husband are called upon to put yourselves out like that, on my behalf. You are up here to enjoy your short holiday together; and you are rare good companions, as I know. What right have I to monopolise him for ten days, and leave you alone? Why should you care, after all, if I do go and knock myself to bits in the interior?"

"That question is unworthy of you, and doesn't deserve an answer," she said on a note of gentle reproof. "Mine does. Will you do what I ask?"

"Since you ask it of me—yes. Always supposing that it suits Desmond to go."

"Of course it will suit him. We will settle it when he comes in."

He leaned back in his chair, and sighed.

"You're amazingly good to me, Mrs Desmond; and I'm an ungrateful brute. Will you overlook that, and play me something warranted to soothe jarred nerves, till your husband comes?"

"Of course I will, gladly. Only you mustn't expect real music from a hireling!"

She chose one of Beethoven's most tenderly gracious Allegrettos, and the soul of the hireling responded creditably to the magic of her touch.

But before she had played many bars a clatter of hoofs announced Desmond's return. He flung himself from the saddle, cleared the verandah steps at a bound, and entered the room:—a man of magnetic vitality, with a temperament like a clear flame; a typical officer of that isolated force to whose gallantry and unwearied devotion to duty India owes more than she is apt to acknowledge, or, possibly, to perceive. He nodded a welcome to Lenox, signed to him to remain seated, and going straight to the piano laid a hand on his wife's shoulder.

"Don't stop. Finish your piece," he said, as she smiled up at him; and he did not remove his hand, but remained standing there, in simple satisfaction at having got back to her.

Now and again, at very rare intervals, Nature seems to select a favoured man and woman to uphold the torch of the ideal, lest it be reduced to sparks and smoke, to refute the cynic and the pessimist; to hearten a world nauseated and discouraged by the eternal tragi-comedy of marriage, with the spectacle of a human relationship of unsullied beauty: a relationship that passes, by imperceptible degrees, from the first antiphony of passionate hearts to a deep deliberate bliss, "durable from the daily dust of life."

Desmond's first marriage had brought him no such revelation of the hidden mysteries of union; no companionship worthy of the name; and the happiness that comes late, on the heels of conflict and pain, takes a more conscious grip on the heart, is more firmly held to, more jealously guarded, than that which meets us on the threshold, and is accepted as part of the natural order of things. Blest with vivacity, courage, and an ardent zest for Frontier soldiering, Desmond had rarely found life other than very good; but he had only proven the full measure of its goodness since his marriage with Honor Meredith. And the mouths brought increasing reliance on her comradeship; increasing insight into the depths and delicacies of a passion that was almost genius. His need of her was deeper now than it had been two years ago, when he had believed himself at the summit of desire. For a great love is like a great mountain-range. Each height scaled reveals farther heights beyond. Attainment is no part of our programme here; and there may well be truth in the axiom that "to travel hopefully is better than to arrive."

But Eldred Lenox, tangled in the twofold cords of temperament and circumstance, was denied even the privilege of travelling hopefully, and at moments like the present he suffered the additional torment of looking into happiness through another man's eyes. It was futile to reiterate the obvious drawbacks of marriage for an ambitious man, standing on the threshold of a coveted career. These distracting Desmonds cheerfully and unconsciously refuted them all! But he accepted the thorns of the situation as toll paid for the privilege of an intimacy he would on no account have forgone, and endured them with the grim stoicism that was his.

The Allegretto ended, Honour swung round on her stool, and set forth her Chumba project without reference to Eldred's threatened departure. Desmond laughingly professed himself ready to obey orders, within reasonable limits; and it was finally decided that he should write at once to Colonel Mayhew, Resident of the native State in which Dalhousie's hills are situated, and whose capital lies in a cup-shaped valley eighteen miles below the English station.

Thereupon Lenox rose to take his leave; but on the threshold he paused, as though an afterthought had occurred to him.

"Next time you happen to go out calling, Mrs Desmond," he said, with studied carelessness, "you might like to look up a Miss Maurice and her brother. They've been here all the winter; and are living on the top of Bakrotas. I met them—some years ago, in Switzerland. Artists, out here for painting purposes—and rather out of the common run. You might find them interesting."

"They sound as if they would be! Thank you for letting me know of their existence. I'll amuse myself by exploiting them while you two are away."

But Lenox had no wish to expatiate upon the subject, and with a muttered disclaimer he was gone.

CHAPTER VI.

"I will but say what mere friends say—
Or only a thought stronger.
I will hold your hand as long as all may—
Or—no very little longer."
—Browning.

"No, I don't like her, and I don't believe I ever shall. One cannot deny that she is beautiful, charming, complete; too complete for my taste. Cela me géne. I know no other way to express it."

Quita Maurice balanced herself on the railing of her matchbox verandah, and gazed critically at the corner where the last of Honor Desmond's jhampannis had not long since disappeared from view. Garth, the inevitable, stood close beside her, faultlessly equipped as always, even to the gold-tipped cigarette, and the violets that blossomed perennially in his coat. He grew them in pots expressly for the purpose; and his bearer set them in a wine-glass on his breakfast-table every morning.

Quita's verdict on her visitor moved him to a smile of half-cynical amusement. He enjoyed her occasional unabashed lapses into the eternal feminine.

"I'm with you there," he answered, heartily. "The worst fault a human being can commit is to be faultless. Poor Mrs Desmond! She will have to subsist without our admiration."

"No need to waste pity on her, mon ami. I am convinced that she gets far more admiration than is good for her as it is. She has only been married a little over two years, I believe, and it is safe to presume that her husband idolises her shadow. She is the sort of woman men put on a pedestal, and worship kneeling; and women mostly detest, because, in their secret hearts, they would like to be up there too! Personally I have no use for pedestals. I am content to be bon camarade! As for that sublime Desmond woman, I feel morally certain that she never commits an indiscretion, or has a knot in her shoe-lace, or loses her scissors!"

"Are you peculiarly lenient towards those three failings?"

"I am quite culpably lenient towards the whole tribe of human failings. They are the salt of life. I have never really understood that incessant harping on the mystery of pain and sin. The question, Why should they be allowed to exist? seems to me simply fatuous. No world worth living in could have been created without them. They are the backbone of all drama; and I love drama inordinately. They put the iron into men's souls, and the grit into their characters. Think what a nauseating crew of sentimentalists we should be,

'If all had love, as every nest hath eggs,
And every head of maize her feathery cap.'

I, for one, should beg to be excused from spending three-score years and ten on a planet full of sugar-plums and kisses!"

She left her perch on the railings, and stood erect, in an unconscious attitude of defiance; and Garth watched her speculatively through narrowed lids. He was wondering whether Mrs Desmond's remark that she had persuaded Captain Lenox to go shooting beyond Chumba, instead of deserting Dalhousie for the interior, might not be accountable for this unusual burst of eloquence.

"I had no notion that you went in for studying big questions of that kind," he remarked, with an amused air of interest.

"Studying them! But no! What call is there to study them? I have my ears and eyes, and my priceless intuitions. It is enough. An artist will learn more about life and character with the help of those three, than all the savants in creation could imbibe from a hecatomb of books. Michel—where are you? What has been keeping you so quiet since Mrs Desmond's departure?"

Michael, who promptly appeared on the threshold, held up a large drawing-block for his sister's inspection.

"Voilà donc! Que dis-tu? Is it not to the life?"

The picture was a rapid, delicate pastel study of Honor Desmond, presenting her, as Michael had said, "to the life." The broad brow, the short straight nose, the strength and tenderness of the mouth and chin, the smile that hovered like a light in her serious eyes; every detail was faultlessly rendered. But Quita's cry of surprise expressed annoyance rather than admiration.

"What possessed you to do that?" she asked, sharply. "It is a living likeness—yes. Better send it to her friend, Captain Lenox. He would give you a hundred and fifty rupees for it like a shot."

The instant the words were out she tingled with mortification at having spoken them in Garth's presence. But he assumed a critical interest in the picture, and Michael, in the first flush of achievement, had eyes and thoughts for nothing else.

"A hundred and fifty? Parbleu, non!" he answered, hotly. "It is a possession, a triumph. I do not part with it for money. All the while she talked to you, I never took my eyes from her face, and I struck while the iron was hot. Mon Dieu, mais die est superbe! C'est une déesse veritable! Rien non plus!"

In ecstatic moments Michael deserted English altogether for the natural language of the emotions; and Quita flashed a glance of amusement at Garth.

"The pedestal already, you see!"

But Michael, deaf or unheeding, continued his paean of praise.

"But the head alone is not enough. Il faut le tout ensemble. Ça sera magnifique. Now at last I have the centre figure for my great picture—Mater Triumphans. In a day or two I call on her. I ask her permission to immortalise her and myself in one achievement. No woman in her senses could refuse so flattering a request; and her lips, her eyes, betray that, goddess or not, she is before all things a woman."

"But, my good Michel," Quita interposed, with a deliberate lightness, "ride your enthusiasm on the curb, I beg of you. Isn't one goddess at a time enough to fill your expansive heart? I warn you that if you are going to disgrace me by ostentatiously falling in love with this Mrs Desmond, I shall give you up for good, and insist on a legal separation! Now, I am tired of idling, and it's high time I went back to my picture." She held out a hand to Garth. "À demain," she said, with a gracious smile of dismissal. "But not till tea-time, please. I have a certain amount of work to get through every day if you have not!"

Garth's reply was conveyed to a lingering pressure of her hand. He was a past master in this discreet method of expressing the inexpressible; and he had the satisfaction of seeing the colour deepen in her cheeks, as she released herself hastily, and passed on into the house.

During a long ride homeward, Garth found time for much interested speculation on the possible issue of events. The situation appeared sufficiently incomprehensible to afford scope for dramatic developments; and he shared to the full Quita's taste for drama, provided always that it did not deprive him of sleep, or render him personally uncomfortable. He shared also her magnanimous attitude towards human shortcomings; frankly acknowledging his own, and skilfully utilising those of other men—and women. But bad men are as often tripped up by the unquenchable spark of good in human nature as good men are by the equally unquenchable spark of evil; and James Garth was not altogether devoid of the little leaven that leavens the whole lump. There were even moments—and the present was one—when it asserted itself to the detriment of his cool-headed schemes. Generally speaking, a husband in the background in no way disturbed his accommodating code of morals. But scruples, hitherto unknown, seemed set like a hedge of defence about this girl, who was, in every respect, so very much a woman.

For all her love of dangerous ground, her airy scorn of conventions, she had a knack of compelling some measure of uprightness, even from so unpromising a subject as James Garth. Thus, bone-bred gossip though he was, his silence in respect of her astounding revelation was assured. Her words, "I trust you, as a gentleman," had quickened that good grain in him, which is the saving grace of us all. Also the knowledge itself hurt him more than he could have believed. It seriously upset his equanimity for no less than a week; not indeed to the extent of damaging his appetite, or his sleep, but enough to make her society a distraction more bitter than sweet; enough to drive him into dining at the Strawberry Bank Hotel, though the cuisine of that mixed establishment compared very unfavourably with his own.

Here he naturally met Lenox, and the meeting reawakened his consuming curiosity; awakened also those primitive savage instincts which no surface civilisation will ever annihilate while the world holds one woman and two men. And how should it be accounted theft to rob a man of that which, to all appearance, he neither possessed nor desired to recapture?

In twenty years of philandering he had never experienced so keen a desire for conquest; and if this inexplicable husband chose to leave his wife in an equivocal position, he must be prepared to accept the consequences, which are, in general, the last things that any average man is prepared to accept. Shrewdness and vanity alike convinced Garth that Quita's attitude on Dynkund, viewed in the light of her subsequent disclosure, counted for nothing; while the fact that for six months she had readily accepted his companionship counted for much. Her fine sense of honour had naturally compelled her to "head him off" dangerous ground. But he consoled himself with the reflection that a woman's sense of honour is rarely her strongest point. Pit her heart against it, and the outcome is merely a question of time. A conviction founded on his own complicated past!

In his esteem, then, nothing stood between him and his desire but a poor crop of scruples, readily trampled under foot; and by a fine stroke of irony Lenox himself completed the trampling process. He, who rarely took an active part in the random, unedifying talk congenial to after-dinner "pegs" and cigars, had one night been moved to administer advice to a rapturous subaltern, in the shape of a few trenchant cynicisms in respect of women and marriage, bidding him not be fool enough to run his misguided head into the noose; and the subaltern had collapsed like a pricked air-ball. But Garth, to his own surprise, retorted with no little warmth; and Lenox, turning in his chair, looked at him deliberately—a glint of steel in his eyes.

"I couldn't presume to cross swords with you, Major," he remarked, on a quiet note of contempt. "Your experience is as extensive as my own is limited; and you have the good luck to be popular. I have not. But that is simply a question of métier. Yours is to flatter women, even behind their backs; whilst I am blockhead enough to speak the truth about them, even to their faces. And the last thing a normal woman wants from any man is—the truth."

From that moment Garth had hardened his heart. And now—a week later—as he rode down from the Crow's Nest, he chuckled to himself over the satisfactory way in which Lenox was playing into his hands by adopting an attitude that would plainly act as a foil to his own deferentially persistent courtship; a metaphorical walking round the walls of Jericho, that must end in capitulation, soon or late.

From his point of view, Quita's unique position of personal freedom, coupled with legal bondage, added a distinct flavour to the whole affair: and so well pleased was he with the aspect of things in general, that, before reaching Potrain, he headed his pony up another corkscrew path, that climbed to another doll's house bungalow. Here he spent a couple of hours, lounging in the drawing-room of one of the lesser lights in his firmament, flattering her by a delicately conveyed impression that he found her the only woman in the station worth talking to. And so, home to his own well-appointed house, where, two hours after an irreproachable dinner, he slept the sleep of the man whose conscience has been trained not to make inconvenient remarks.

CHAPTER VII.

"God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our lives out."
—Browning.

Before May was out Honor met her unpromising acquaintance several times, by chance. But nothing beyond formal greetings passed between them. Twice she happened to be riding alone with Lenox; the third time, her husband was with them: and on every occasion Quita's companion was James Garth,—the only one among them all who enjoyed the situation. Quita herself found a perverse satisfaction, unworthy of her best moments, in thus emphasising her indifference to her husband's presence; ignoring, with characteristic heedlessness, the fact that a two-edged weapon is an ill thing to handle: and Lenox, accepting her unspoken intimation au pied de la lettre, steeled himself to half-cynical, half-stoical endurance.

He had returned heartened, and fortified by a week of stirring sport, and by closer contact with a personality wholesome and invigorating as a hill wind; a sympathy of the practical order, that found expression in matter-of-fact service and good fellowship, rather than in speech. He had given up all thought of leaving the station; had decided to set his teeth, and go through with his ordeal, sooner than disappoint these new-found friends, who seemed already to have become a part of his life. Such rapid intimacies are a distinctive feature of a country where a guest may come for a night, and stay for a month; where all white men are brothers, in the widest sense of the word.

And Eldred Lenox did not hold with half measures. Since he stood his ground in order to please the Desmonds, he held himself ready to fall in with any joint plans they might choose to make. Thus, he agreed to share in their arrangements for the June camp, at Kajiar,—a natural glade hid in the heart of Kalatope Forest: and even accepted, without demur, Colonel Mayhew's proposal to preface the 'week' with a two days' house-party at the Chumba Residency;—a picturesque house, whose garden of lawns, and roses, and English trees falls sheer to the eddying river below. The two sportsmen had spent a couple of days here on their way back, the Resident being down in Chumba on State business; and his suggestion had been the natural outcome of Desmond's keen interest in the book which was his hobby of the moment.

"I must be down here then," he explained, "for the Minjla Mèla, a superstitious ceremony by which we test the luck of the State for the coming year. An unfortunate buffalo is flung into the Ravee, just above the rapids; and if he succumbs, or scrambles out on the far side, the gods will not fail us. But if he lands on the town bank, they won't trouble their heads about us till next June. Naturally we do our best to prevent such a catastrophe, in spite of our conviction that the matter is settled by the will of the gods! As far as I know, the ceremony is peculiar to Chumba; and this would be a good chance for you to see it, if you don't mind a trifle of heat, and if your wife would care to come too, so much the better."

"She'll come like a shot, thanks," Desmond answered heartily.

"Good!—We'll get up a native dinner at the Palace in honour of the occasion. My little girl has set her heart on the plan, rather to my wife's dismay. The Maurices want to come too; and we may have to include Garth, on her account; though I confess I wanted her for myself! She's worth talking to, that girl. There's a touch of genius in her composition, and a touch of the folly that's apt to go along with it; or she would never give the gossips a chance to couple her name with Garth's. If he is in earnest, so much the worse for her.—We may count on you, Lenox, I hope?" he added, turning to the impassive man at his side, whom he had unwittingly smitten between the joints of his harness.

Lenox's muttered assent was a trifle indistinct, owing to the thick pipe-stem between his teeth, and rising deliberately, he passed out of the smoking-room into the wistaria-shadowed verandah, where the turbulent voice of the river seemed to echo his own mood. It was well for himself, and for James Garth also, that he ran no risk of meeting the man at that moment.

The thought of that first fortnight in June unnerved him. For Colonel Mayhew's words had done more than turn the knife in an open wound. Lenox was blest, or curst, with that most pitiless of mentors, a Scotch conscience. Whatever Quita's failings, or her attitude to himself, there could be no shelving the fact that he was her husband:—the guardian of her good name, the one man on earth who could claim the right to criticise her conduct. Her probable repudiation both of his criticism, and his right to offer it, did not, in his view, justify him in standing aloof, if need for speech should arise. Possibly passion, smouldering at the heart of duty, urged him towards the desperate experiment. But if so, he would not admit it, even to himself. He merely decided—with an access of fastidious disgust at the whole situation—to accept this fate-sent opportunity for judging how far her behaviour warranted Colonel Mayhew's kindly concern. For he knew enough of Garth and his methods to feel certain that, in his case, to covet an invitation was to procure it.

After all, he reflected bitterly, a closer acquaintance with facts might cure him of an infatuation against which pride and inherited instinct had rebelled ill vain: and so intricate are the mazes of self-deception, that he firmly believed in his own desire to be cured.

It was, no doubt, solely in pursuance of this purpose that, a few days later, he added his initials, with a wry face of resignation, to a subscription list, proposing that the bachelors of the station should give a ball on the third of June. He had not seen the inside of a ballroom for years: but since the season seemed marked for strange experiences, this one might as well be included with the rest. And in the meantime, this inconsistent misogynist slept little, smoked inordinately, and spent the greater part of his leisure at Terah Cottage. Perhaps this also was part of the cure!

Desmond noted the fact, not without an occasional spark of annoyance. For all his magnanimity, the man was masculine to the core; hot-blooded, and still very much a lover at heart. But pride and a boundless trust in the woman he had won had withheld him as yet from serious comment.

Lenox dined with them on the night of the dance; and came armed with programmes, at Honor's request.

"Are you going to give me my share before we start?" he asked, as they shook hands.

"If I do, will you try to dance?"

He laughed abruptly. "Not I. It would be a sight to make angels weep! I shall take you right away from the whole thing, and talk to you—that's all. Is that good enough?"

"Quite good enough!"

He scanned an open programme with perplexed interest, as though it were an Egyptian hieroglyph.

"How long do each of these things last?" he asked, with evident amusement.

"About twelve minutes, with the pause."

"What's the good of twelve minutes? Can't I have them in batches, three at a time. Or would that be going quite out of bounds?"

Honor laughed. . . . "I'm afraid so! Though it would be far nicer. But I will give you one 'batch,' and two isolated ones; and that's a generous allowance, I assure you."

"Thanks.—I suppose Desmond takes you in to supper?"

"Yes. It's a standing engagement! Why don't you ask Miss Maurice?"
There was a moment of silence.

"We are not intimate enough for that," he answered, with a bad imitation of unconcern; and Honor wondered, as she had done before now, wherein lay the key to a curiosity-provoking situation. But just then Desmond joined them; and no more was said.

The moment they entered the ballroom Lenox was aware of his wife,—the focal point in a circle of men, distributing her favours with a smiling impartiality that was, in itself, a delicate form of coquetry, while Garth stood sentinel beside her, with an unmistakable suggestion of 'No Thoroughfare,' which he could assume to a nicety; and which Lenox noted with a curse at the restrictions imposed upon civilised man.

But a second glance at Quita crowded all else out of his mind. It was his first sight of her in full evening dress, and he stood spellbound by the radiant quality of her charm: a charm that triumphed over minor imperfections of feature and form; a mental and spiritual vitality that had deepened rather than diminished with the years. Her dress, like everything about her, was an instinctive expression of herself: though Lenox, while appreciating its harmony, could not have defined it in set terms. He knew that it was of velvet; that it sheathed her rounded slenderness as a rind sheathes its fruit; that the light and shade on its surface, as she moved, reminded him of willows in a wind; that, from shoulder to hem, the eye was nowhere checked, the simplicity of outline nowhere marred by objectless incidents of adornment. He noted also that its indefinite colour was repeated in a row of aquamarines, that glistened like drops of sea-water at her throat.

A light touch on his arm recalled him to outward things.

"Captain Lenox, where are your manners?" Honor Desmond remonstrated, with laughter in her eyes. "The Mayhews have just gone past, and you looked straight through them! Is that the way you welcome your guests?"

He muttered an incoherent apology, and fervently hoped that she had not observed the direction of his gaze. A vain hope, seeing that she was a woman!

"Better get safe into the card-room before I do anything worse!" he added uneasily. "I'll be back for number five. Trust me not to forget."

As he crossed the barn of a room,—lavishly draped with bazaar bunting, and starred with radiating bayonets,—his eyes lighted on Kenneth Malcolm, the Engineer subaltern, whose current of courtship had been checked by Maurice's arrival on the scene:—a boy of stalwart build; his straight features and well-poised head justifying the sobriquet of Apollo, bestowed upon him by an effusive admirer, whose sole reward had been a cordial detestation. He leaned against the wall, absently twirling the cord of his programme; his attention centred on a corner of the room, where Elsie Mayhew—an incarnate moonbeam of a girl—was critically examining the pattern on her fan, while Maurice possessed himself of her programme, and sprinkled it liberally with the letter M. In the boy's bottled-up resentment Lenox saw a reflection of his own; and the fact moved him to scorn rather than sympathy.

"Damned idiots, both of us!" he reflected savagely. "A couple of dogs whose bones have been confiscated, and we haven't even the pluck to snarl."

The opening valse struck up as he reached the cardroom. Without looking directly at his wife, he saw Garth's arm encircle her waist, saw him hold her thus, for an appreciable moment, before starting; and sat down to the whist table with murder in his heart.

At number five he re-entered the ballroom to claim Honor Desmond for his 'batch' of dances, and to take her, as he had said, right away from it all. She found him little inclined for talk; yet none the less quick to appreciate her understanding of his mood.

"Thank you for bearing with me," he said, as they parted in one of the many doorways opening on to the long verandah. "I won't come in. I am in the humour for the profound philosophies of tobacco and the stars."

"Better companions than a mere woman!" she answered, smiling into the gravity of his eyes. "Don't deny it. I have no taste for lip service."

"Nor I the smallest gift for it. Still, truth is truth; and a good deal depends on the quality of—the mere woman."

She vouchsafed him the stateliest shadow of a curtsey.

"I believe I shall end in converting you, after all! Number twelve.
Don't forget."

And turning from him she saw that her husband stood a few paces off, watching them with a thoughtful scrutiny that caught at her heart. Gliding across the polished floor, she slipped a hand under his elbow, and leaned close to him.

"Darling," she whispered, "I am so glad this is ours." Without a word, he put his arm round her, and swept her into the crowd.

For a while Lenox followed them with his eyes, as they circled smoothly in and out among the dancers, as notable a couple as the room contained. Then he raked the shifting crowd for Quita's grey-green figure,—in vain. Neither she nor Garth was to be seen. It needed small perspicacity to locate them: and grinding his teeth Lenox went out again into a night jewelled with the unnumbered bonfires of the universe. Striking a match, he lit his pipe, in defiance of the knowledge that for the past few weeks he had been persistently overstepping his self-imposed allowance, and fell to pacing the railed path outside the building.

Was it altogether his own fault, he wondered bitterly, that he stood thus, cut off from the core of life, breaking his teeth upon the husks of it, and making believe that they satisfied his hunger? In the tragedies resulting from 'the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things,' that question flung, again and again into the 'derisive silence of eternity,' mocks the soul with echo's answer. Where lies the blame? Where, indeed? For all his vaunted supremacy man is not always master of his fate. Circumstance, heredity, the despicable trifle, the inexpert finger, which a certain type of human is so zealous to thrust into an alien life, compass him about with a cloud of witnesses to his own impotence.

With which conclusion, softened by the kindly influence of drugged tobacco, Lenox knocked the ashes out of his pipe; and decided that since he was here to observe his wife and Garth, and to cure himself of an undignified infatuation, it would be well to return to the ballroom till number twelve.

But as he moved forward a low laugh, near at hand, chained him to the spot. Then Quita emerged from a patch of shadow, closely followed by Garth. She tilted her chin, and flung a smiling threat at him over her shoulder.

"If you can't be more reasonable, I shall cancel your remaining dances and give them to the Riley boy." Which announcement brought him swiftly to her side; and Lenox failed to catch his murmured reply. They passed on without perceiving him; and he followed . . . merely from a sense of duty!

At one of the open doorways, that flung panels of light across the verandah, they paused; and he paused also, a few paces off. The couples within were forming themselves into ordered squares.

"Lancers," she said, in a tone of distaste.

"Are you dancing them?" he asked.

"No."

"Come and sit out again, then; and I'll be as reasonable as you please."

She glanced quickly round the room, as if in search of something.

"Very well," she said: and turning on the threshold, came face to face with her husband.

With a scarcely perceptible start, she acknowledged his grave bow of recognition, and drew back to let him pass. But he remained close enough to catch what followed.

"I'd rather dance than sit out, after all," she announced, with a brisk change of manner.

"But, dear lady, . . . why?"

She laughed. "What a question! I thought you pretended to know something about women? I claim the divine right of whim. Voilà, tout! One can't spend the evening in explanation. The spirit moves me to romp. It's infinitely more wholesome than mooning under the stars. All we want now is a cheery vis-à-vis. Ah . . . there's Michel. The very man!"

She signalled across the room with her fan, and Michael came skidding and slithering towards her, a delighted girl clinging to his arm:—a girl in the glamour of her first season, a-thrill to her white kid finger-tips because these rested on the sleeve of a living artist, who had already paid her one or two chivalry-coated compliments.

"Now why the deuce did she weather-cock round like that?" Lenox wondered, floundering in the quicksands of masculine ignorance.

But no answer suggested itself; because this woman, who was his, and yet not his,—this woman, with her many-hued personality, rich in subtle contradictions—was a sealed book to him, and seemed like to remain so. And what, after all, are the hearts that beat closest to our own but sealed books, which we open from time to time, at random; too often at the wrong page? But a ballroom is no fit place for abstract meditation. The lust of eye and ear, the pride of life, challenge the sense at every turn, till mere thought seems a mighty bloodless affair.

Lenox moved back to the doorway, leaned against the woodwork, and folding his arms, surveyed the scene before him with the apathetic interest of the large and mystified. The long room was crowded with jumbled atoms of colour, like a damaged kaleidoscope; with talk and laughter; with the whisper of sweeping skirts, and the clink of spurs. Then the first provocative bars set every foot in motion; and the kaleidoscope effect was complete.

Lenox,—towering isolated, amid a world of light-hearted couples,—was aware that beneath his surface indifference there lurked a certain shamefaced envy of these bewildering mortals who could shuffle off the years, and revert, unabashed, to the entrancing follies of childhood; and who could yet, in lucid intervals, grapple undismayed with intricacies of Indian legislation, lead a forlorn hope, love and suffer and die, if need be, with a stiff lip, and an obstinate faith in 'the ultimate decency of things.' For of a truth, the earth holds no more fantastic farrago of folly and heroism than your average human being; and musing on these things, Lenox decided that there must have been some radical flaw in his own education.

Not twenty feet away, the General himself—the host-in-chief of the evening—condemned, despite increasing years and girth, to the Eton jacket of boyhood, pranced and glided with elaborate precision, and took every opportunity of twirling plump little Mrs Mayhew almost off her feet. Both laughed inordinately at each repetition of the mild joke: and if the C.B. blazing on the General's mess-jacket, and the little lady's full-grown daughter contrasted oddly with their passing display of childishness, both were serenely blind to the fact.

But among a hundred dancers, not one plunged more whole-heartedly into the folly of the moment than Quita. She had stationed herself opposite the door where Lenox stood, and the very spirit of devilry seemed to have entered into her, driving her to italicise every trait in herself that must needs grate on his fastidiousness where a woman's conduct was concerned. Her effervescent gaiety dominated the 'set,' which speedily degenerated into a romp till, in the third figure, an incident occurred which partially brought her to her senses.

The room reeled and hummed with spinning circles, like living Katherine-wheels, when Quita,—losing her precarious hold upon her partner's coat-sleeve, and flying outward, by a natural impetus that must have sent her crashing against the woodwork of the door,—found herself caught, and steadied by her husband's hands at her waist. For a lightning instant he held her thus—breathless and throbbing, like a bird prisoned in his grasp: then he straightened himself, and let fall his empty hands.

"I am sorry," he muttered, barely looking at her. "But I was afraid you might hurt yourself."

"Thank you. It was very stupid of me."

She left him hurriedly, red-hot vexation tingling in her cheeks: and when next the Katherine-wheels spun about, she remained stationary, smiling and waving her hand in answer to repeated invitations to "come on."

Lenox remained stationary also, though the whole scene had suddenly become hateful to him: for that moment of contact, and the rush of colour to his wife's face, had roused him to the need for immediate action. Thus, when a final mad galop scattered the coherent atoms of the kaleidoscope, he intercepted Quita and her partner, as they hurried out to secure a favourite nook.

But the polite formula of the ballroom did not spring readily to his lips.

"Have you a spare dance to give me?" he asked bluntly. "Since you evidently don't object to sitting out."

His tone had in it more of demand than of request, an effect heightened by his deliberate omission of her name; and against his will annoyance lurked in the last words. But some men have a positive talent for standing in their own light.

For a second or two her eyes challenged his in mute amazement. Each seemed trying to read the other's thought. But pride darkens insight: and at the critical moment a slight movement of the arm she held reminded her of Garth's glimpse behind the scenes. She pulled herself together, and made an obvious feint of consulting her programme.

"If you really wanted one, you should have spoken earlier," she rebuked him lightly. "I'm afraid I haven't so much as half an extra to offer you now."

He accepted his dismissal with a curt bow of acknowledgment.

"Thought I wanted to make love to her, no doubt," he reflected savagely, as he moved away. And she passed on into the verandah, wondering . . . wondering why he had wanted that dance, and whether she would have thrown some one over for him, but for Garth's opportune reminder at her elbow.

On the opening of the next dance, Lenox sought and found Honor Desmond, silently offered his arm, and led her through the verandah out into the starshine,—which is a reality in India, on moonless nights.

"What a thundering relief it is to get away from it all!" he said at length. "Would it bother you to stroll a little way up the hill? We shall be crowded out here, in no time; and I must have another pipe."

"Let's stroll then, by all means. I should enjoy it; and you know how I love tobacco. I saw you looking on at that dance; and I rather envied you. I often wish I could set aside a few dances just for looking on, without having to make talk for any one. People interest me so passionately; always have done, since I can remember."

"Even Button Quails, and black-hearted woman-haters?"

"Yes. Especially the woman-haters; because they need converting!"

"And are unconvertible," Lenox declared with a laugh. "But don't you ever get sickened with the deadly sameness of the whole tribe of us,—grinding ourselves to dust in the eternal treadmill of hatred and love, hope and despair? Every conceivable human complication has been repeated ad nauseam since Adam made a fool of himself in the garden of Eden."

"And through all that endless sameness, no two men and women have ever behaved twice alike! That's where the interest comes in, don't you see? To-night, for instance, Miss Maurice and that pretty child Elsie Mayhew are both wasting their sweetness on men quite unworthy of them; but each is doing the same thing in a fashion so entirely her own, that it is not like looking on at the same play at all. I am specially concerned over the Mayhew muddle, for I believe that handsome Engineer boy is capable of breaking his heart in earnest because Elsie has lost hers pro tem.,—engaging little goose that she is. Really I sometimes think that the man and woman puzzle is just an endless game of cross questions and crooked answers!"

Lenox laughed again, harshly.

"That's a straight shot!" he said. "It's a mad world; and the maddest creature in it is the man who stakes his happiness on the state of a woman's heart."

Honor slipped her hand from his arm.

"Really, Captain Lenox," she protested, half-laughing, half in earnest, "that remark almost amounts to an insult! What do you suppose Theo would say if he heard you?"

"Wouldn't stop to pick his language," Lenox answered with a twisted smile. "But his testimony counts for nothing. He has found the one woman among a thousand, that even Solomon failed to find; and the Lord knows he didn't judge them from hearsay!"

The sincerity underlying his bluntness brought the blood to Honor's cheeks. "Theo has simply found—a woman who loves him," she answered softly. "A discovery most men can make if they choose; even rank heretics like you! Will you forgive me, I wonder, if I say that I believe the thing you really need, though you may not guess it, is . . . a woman in your life?"

Lenox did not answer: and they walked on for a time in silence.

"Have I vexed you?" Honor asked at length.

"No. You touched an exposed nerve. That was all. And I should like you to know the truth now; or at least part of it.—Five years ago I did take . . . a woman into my life, as you put it; and I have never known real peace or comfort since."

Honor started, and turned upon him a face of incredulity.

"Captain Lenox! Do you mean—have you actually—been married?"

"I actually am married, in the eyes of the law, at least. What's more, my wife is here, in Dalhousie, in that cursed ballroom,—with neither my name nor my ring to protect her—playing the fool for the amusement or perdition of another chap. You spoke of her a minute ago. I need hardly say more, need I?"

"No, no. I understand it all now," she murmured, deeply moved. "Then that was why you wanted to go away last month?"

"Yes."

"And I stupidly made things harder, in my blind zeal to help you?"

"No, indeed. You simply convinced me, without suspecting it, that it would be cowardly to bolt at sight. Besides, it would have amounted to an open confession that—one cared."

"And don't you—care?"

Lenox clenched his teeth upon an inarticulate sound; and his amber mouthpiece snapped like a stick of sealing-wax. He took the pipe from his mouth; eyed it ruefully, and slipped it into his breast-pocket.

"A good friend gone," he muttered. "And all on account of a woman who doesn't care a snap of the fingers whether one is alive or dead."

"In my opinion that remains to be proved."

"Does it? Isn't her conduct with that confounded ladykiller proof enough to convince you?"

"No."

"Well, then, look here. Ten minutes ago I went so far as to ask her for a dance. She gave me the snub direct: and she'll not get a chance to refuse another request of mine—that's certain."

Honor's lips lifted at the corners.

"I wonder what tone of voice you asked her in?" was all she said.

"Quite the wrong one, no doubt. I was in no humour for going on my knees. But she knew right enough that I wouldn't have risked refusal, unless I was very keen on the dance."

"All the same, you will give her another chance. You must. No act of folly on her part can make it right for you to leave her in such a false position."

"The position was her own choice,—not mine."

"One could guess as much. Yet the fact remains that she is—yours, to make or mar: and it seems to me no less than your duty to pocket your pride, and save her from her own foolishness in spite of herself."

Lenox drew an audible breath, like a man in pain.

"You do know how to hit between the eyes," he said very low. "But—I have suffered enough at her hands."

"And has she suffered nothing—at yours?"

Honor's voice was scarcely louder than his own, and her pulses throbbed at her own daring. Lenox stood stock-still, and looked at her.

"Upon . . my . . soul," he said slowly, "you are a stunning woman!
I . . ."

"Please don't think I meant you to answer such a question," she broke in hurriedly, with flaming cheeks.

"Of course not. You meant it as a reminder that there are two sides to every question."

"Yes. How nice of you to understand! I have no shadow of right to take you to task. But when the fate of two lives seems hanging on a thread, one dare not keep silence.—Now, I think we ought to turn back. And I wonder if you would mind telling me a little about your wife," she added, with diplomatic intent to prolong his softened mood. "She is so charming; so individual. But I haven't been able to get at her at all. She seems almost to dislike me; and I am just beginning to guess why."

"Nonsense . . . nonsense," he protested brusquely. "You are entirely mistaken."

"That also remains to be proved!"

They retraced their steps down the rough path that descends from the Mall to the Assembly Rooms, walking very slowly, as people do when absorbed. Honor, with all a woman's skill, imparted a flavour of reminiscence to their talk; and no man with a spark of love in his heart can hold out, for long, against the magic suggestiveness of memory. For all his guarded indifference of manner, she felt the ice melting under her touch: and the passionate human interest, of which she had already spoken, held her, to exclusion of such minor trivialities as possibly distracted partners. For this woman, the human note,—be it never so untuneful—surpassed the sublimest music plucked from the heart of wood or wire.

Arrived on the gravel ledge outside the building, they paused in a shaft of light, still intent on their subject; till the inspiriting rhythm of a polka shattered the stillness, and Honor, turning hastily, caught sight of an erect figure in the doorway behind her.

"There's Theo. He seems to be looking for me," she said. "Why, we must have talked through two dances. Come."

But at the foot of the verandah steps Lenox held out his hand.

"The evening is ended for me. I am going straight home, to think over all you have said. I'll be round by ten to-morrow. Good-night—and thank you."

He italicised the last words by a vigorous hand-clasp; and a moment later she stood in the doorway, confronting her husband. A glance at his face put her laughing apology to flight.

"I tell you what it is, Honor," he broke out hotly, "you're going too far altogether. Here has Maurice been letting half Dalhousie know that he couldn't find you anywhere; and the last dance—was mine. Heaven knows where you buried yourselves. I didn't attempt to look. Lenox has no business to monopolise you in this way. Woman-hater, indeed!"

"It was not his fault," she flashed out, in an impulse more generous than wise: but her blood was as quick to take fire as his own.

"Then it was yours, which is fifty times worse."

Honor lifted her head with a superb dignity of gesture.

"As you please," she said quietly. "It is useless to attempt explanation here, or anywhere, till you are more . . like yourself."

Returning couples were by now besieging the doorway; and she passed on into the ballroom, her head still high, her lips compressed, lest others should note their tendency to quiver. A woman who loves the man of her choice with every fibre of her being does not readily forget, though she may forgive, his first rough words to her.

Honor was claimed at once by Kenneth Malcolm, a favourite partner, boy though he was. But the keen edge of her interest was blunted. She wanted one thing only to be alone with Theo; to set his mind at rest: and those 'separated selves,' who drew her like nothing else on earth, became of a sudden mere voluble obstructions between herself and her desire.

Half an hour later she came up to him, where he stood, laughing and talking in a group of men.

"I am tired, Theo," she said in a low tone. "Mr Maurice is getting my dandy for me. But don't come away if you'd rather stop on."

Their eyes locked for an instant.

"Is that likely?" he asked, a gleam in his own.

"I don't know."

"You do know. Look sharp and get your things on."

Michael Maurice did not hurry himself over the congenial task of settling his déesse véritable among the cushions of her dandy,—a hybrid conveyance, half canoe, half cane lounge, slung from the shoulders of four men, by an ingenious arrangement of straps and cross poles. Closer acquaintance had deepened his admiration: but a nameless something in her manner warned him that it must not be expressed in his usual promiscuous fashion. She had refused, very sweetly but decisively, the honour of appearing in his great picture. But Desmond had succumbed to the temptation of procuring a portrait of her and 'little Paul.' "At the worst, I can sell a pony to pay for it," he had said, in answer to her remonstrance. "And I shall think it cheap at the price!"

And now, as the dandy-bearers turned to mount the ascent, he came to his wife's side. She had drawn off her gloves, and one hand rested on the woodwork of her canoe. He covered it with his own, walking by her thus, for a few steps, in silence: and it was enough.

"Mount now," she commanded him softly. "And let's hurry home, I've ever so much to tell you."

He obeyed: and they journeyed upward to familiar music of hoof-beats, and the murmur of jhampannies, wrapt about by the magic of a night so still that all the winds seemed to have gone round with the sun to the other side of the world.

A tray set with glass and silver awaited them in the drawing-room.

Honor, entering first, slipped the long cloak from her shoulders with a satisfied sigh, a sense of passing from the unreal to the real, which she often experienced on returning from a dance: and underlying all, a profound pity for the lone and ill-mated women, in a world of oddments and misfits, who have never felt the thrill of such home-comings as this of hers to-night. Then she swept round, and fronted her husband:—a gleaming figure, like a statue cut in ivory; no colour anywhere, save the living tints of her face and eyes and hair.

"Well?" she laughed, on a low clear note of happiness. "I hope you are properly ashamed of yourself!"

But before the words were out, he had her in his arms; and for a supreme moment the great illusion was theirs that they were not two, but one, as the Book decrees.

Then she pushed him gently into a chair, and kneeling beside him drew his arm around her, resting her head against his in a fashion inexpressibly tender. The natural dignity that was hers set a high value on such sweet familiarities: and if Desmond submitted to them in silence, it was because the man in him was too deeply moved for speech.

Then she told him, at some length, all that she had gleaned of the past and present relations between Lenox and his wife.

"Now, do you see how I came to lose sight of everything for the time being?" she concluded, smiling up at him. "So far as I can gather, things seem to be at a deadlock, unless one can persuade him to take the first step forward."

"And you want to play Providence, as usual? Is that it?"

"Don't laugh at me, Theo! I am in earnest. I would gladly move heaven and earth to put things straight between them."

"But this seems a case of moving a Scot. A far tougher job, I can tell you!"

"Well, I think I moved him a little to-night; and he is coming round to-morrow for a ride." Desmond frowned; and she made haste to add; "Now that is just where I must have your co-operation, Theo, or I can do nothing. I want you to trust me, and give me a free hand for these next few weeks. Will you, . . please?"

"Does that mean I am to let you be about with Lenox as much as you choose?"

"Probably not more than I have been so far. I only want to be sure that whatever I do you won't speak to me again as you did to-night."

She felt the muscles of his arm tighten.

"I think you may feel sure of that much," he said. "But you are asking a very hard thing of me, Honor. Lenox is a thorough good chap; and I don't want to be driven into disliking him. It isn't as if I were a saint, like Paul. I'm just a man, and a grasping one at that! What's more, I am very jealous for you; and I have the right to be. Society doesn't recognise philanthropic motives. It takes you and your acts at their face value . . ."

"I know, I know,"—she straightened herself impulsively; her hands clasped, her bare arms laid across his knees. "And I'll be ever so circumspect, dearest, I promise you. But oh, Theo, . . . don't you understand? It is just because we are so blessedly happy, you and I, that the thought of what those two foolish people are missing troubles me so sorely."

Such an appeal was irresistible. They had lived deeply enough, these two, to know the real importance of happiness.

"Bless your big heart," he answered warmly. "I understand right enough. By all means help 'em if you can. I'll not baulk you. But it's a delicate task; and I don't quite see how you are going to set about it."

"Nor do I,—yet. One can only trust to intuition, and the inspiration of the moment. From the little he said, it seems that the first move ought to come from her: and possibly my intimacy with him may help to bring her to her senses. Everything depends, of course, on how much she cares. That's still an unknown quantity. But she dislikes me already; which is a promising sign!—Now I am going to fill your pipe, and pour you out a peg; and we'll enjoy ourselves till it's time for second supper!"

It is just such quiet hours of heart-to-heart intimacy that constitute true marriage. For in these uneventful moments links are forged and soldered strong enough to resist the buffeting of storms, or the deadlier, corrosive influence of those minor miseries which poison the very core of life.

A handful of stars—visible through the open glass door into the verandah—had began to pale, when Desmond lifted his wife to her feet, and blew out the lamp. In the profound stillness their footsteps and low laughter sounded up the wooden stairs. Then a door shut somewhere in the house, and the night absorbed them into herself.

CHAPTER VIII.

"Ce n'est pas le mort qui separe le plus les individus."
—De Coulevain.

And what of Lenox, after Honor Desmond's sympathetic exertions on his behalf?

He went straight from her side to the cloak-room; and thence slowly back to his unhomelike rooms at the hotel; a dark solitary figure, with bent head, and a heart full of tumultuous hopes and fears. The events of the evening had stirred him as he had not been stirred since those early days of torment, of undignified oscillation between yearning and despair: and now, at last, love unsteadied for the first time the foundations of his pride; brought home to him the cardinal truth that all the beauty and terror of life spring from the inexorable law of duality that links man and woman, act and consequence, with the same passionless unconcern.

All the way up the hill, this man—who loved night and her manifestations as most men love the morning—had no thought to spare for the splendour of the heavens or the shrouded majesty of earth, so absorbed was he in framing and rejecting possible letters to his wife, who, for all he knew, had already half-lost her heart to another man.

The small sitting-room where Brutus, the faithful, awaited his coming, was more or less a replica of his larger one at Dera Ishmael: the chronically disordered table, books, pipes, sketches, his inseparable friends, the bull terrier, and the brown tobacco-jar. All these, the familiars of his lonely hours, gave him silent greeting as he crossed the threshold. But for once his spirit failed to respond. The witchery of his wife's lips and eyes; the distracting music of her laughter; that one poignant moment of contact with her living, palpitating self, and Honor Desmond's belief in an undreamed-of possibility, had kindled the man's repressed passion as a lighted match kindles dry powder; had revived in him the common human need, which neither ambition nor work, however absorbing, has yet been known to satisfy.

"My God," he thought. "If I believed I had a ghost of a chance to get hold of her again, I'd go back to that infernal ballroom this minute!"

He turned, as if to carry out his resolve: but at the last, shut down the flood-gates of emotion, fell back on years of self-discipline, and told his heart he was a fool. He had yet to learn that there is a folly worth more than all the wisdom of philosophers, the folly of a man who loves a woman better than his own soul.

Going over to the table, he turned up the lamp, acknowledged the ponderous jubilations of Brutus, and took the damaged pipe out of his pocket. Then he stood looking at it thoughtfully, as it lay in the palm of his hand; an eloquent testimony to that which had been starved, denied, trampled upon for years,—with this result! Smiling half-scornfully at his new-found sentimentalism, he put the pieces into an empty cigarette tin, and thrust it into the top drawer of his table. As he did so, a strange thought invaded his mind. Some day, perhaps, he would show it to her; and how delightfully she would laugh at him for his pardonable foolishness!

But in the meantime the wooing and winning of her still remained to be achieved; a unique position for a husband!

Absorbed in thoughts evoked by the bare possibility of success, Lenox mechanically drew out his empty tobacco-pouch, opened the jar, and thrust a hand into its capacious depths.

Then he started; and two lines of vexation furrowed his forehead. For his fingers, descending in search of the good brown leaf, that was more to him than meat and drink, encountered only a chill hardness,—the bottom of the jar.

He had not emptied it when filling his pouch that morning; and being much preoccupied had not even noticed how little was left. Evidently, during his absence, a hotel servant had helped himself to the remaining handful, and a clear ten days must elapse before the arrival of a fresh consignment from home.

He gathered up the remaining scraps, and gazed at them blankly. His consignments were carefully timed to overlap one another. By rights the jar should have contained quite a fortnight's supply of his elixir vitae: and it took him one or two seconds to grasp the full significance of that which had befallen him.

"Great Heaven! I must have been overdoing it like blazes this last month," he reflected grimly, "And how about the next ten days?"

He stood aghast before that simple question, and its obvious answer. It was as if the earth has opened under his feet; as if he had suddenly discovered that only a thin crust intervened between himself and the crater of a volcano. And he had travelled hitherward blindly; goaded by the threefold necessity to work, and sleep, and forget. Thus, stealthily, inexorably, a habit creeps upon a man; enclosing him mesh by mesh in a network imponderable as spun silk, tenacious as steel wire. A sudden movement, a break in the hypnotic influence of routine, and he wakes to find himself prisoned in a web of his own weaving.

Lenox pushed aside the jar impatiently, as though it were in some way to blame; and sank into his chair, head bent, legs outstretched; the picture of defeat. All his thoughts and hopes crashed about him in ruins: and Lenox, contemplating the fragments with a numb acquiescence far removed from resignation, saw only the old maddening irony at work; saw himself, standing yet again, on the threshold of an Eden locked and barred against him; felt in every nerve the grip of the pitiless fact, and asked himself fiercely; "What next?"

Gradually thought penetrated the dull ache of rebellion; and Memory, that capricious handmaid of the brain, unearthed from the rubbish-heap of things forgotten, an incident of early days.

He recalled how, on a certain night, after the confiscation of their candles, and a stern injunction from old Ailie to speak "nae word" till morning, his elder brother—greatly daring—had invaded his bed, and with lips set close to his ear had startled and thrilled him with the following announcement:—

"Listen, Eldred,—what do you think? I've found out at last why Uncle Jock won't tell about grandfather, and why there's an empty place in the big album where he ought to be. Ailie told me. I bothered her, and bothered her, till she said I should hear it for a warning; and I think you ought to hear it for a warning too. She says grandfather served the East India Company for forty years. He was a grand soldier, and a sportsman; a great tall man, like you will be. Ailie says you 'have his face.' But he went to hell"—this in an awestruck whisper—"through eating too much opium, like some of the natives do out there. I wonder if it's nice stuff to eat; don't you?"

To the boy of ten, listening with rapt interest, his grandfather's backsliding had sounded only a few degrees more heinous than gormandising at Christmas; and since Ailie had proved obdurate when pressed, and even bribed for further information, the spark of curiosity had died out for lack of fuel. But to the man of five-and-thirty, racked with reawakened passion, and with a restless irritability, whose significance could no longer be ignored, the memory of his brother's whispered revelation flashed like a lightning-streak across his present dilemma; leaving him in the grasp of those invisible forces that are the true masters of destiny; that must either break or be broken by man's individual spirit and will. For some of us the struggle is conscious; for some unconscious; for others it never arises at all: because only the touchstone of circumstance can evoke any one of those past lives whereof each single life is so mysteriously compact.

For Eldred Lenox, imbued with his uncle's iron creed, the fight would, of necessity, be conscious and unremitting. But he had no heart to begin it yet. He felt as a man may feel who is suddenly struck blind. Thought, movement, life itself, seemed paralysed by a fear unnameable, and new; the fear of that other self, who is the arch-enemy of us all.

One certainty alone stood out, like a black headland from a sea of mist; all immediate hope of ratifying his marriage was at an end. There spoke his tyrannical conscience with disconcerting directness: and Lenox had never acquired the art of disguising plain fact in a garment of high-sounding words. He told himself straightly that no right-minded man could deliberately risk handing down to others such a heritage of struggle and possible failure as was his. Yet, in the same breath, the Devil whispered a plausible reminder that men as good as he had taken the risk time after time; that De Quincey himself had followed passion's dictates seemingly without a twinge of self-reproach. But Lenox was too single-minded to take shelter behind the failures of others. For him the principle was all. For him all thought of marriage must be set aside, at least, until he knew for certain how completely the subtle poison had entered into his blood.

"Thank God she didn't give me the chance I wanted!" he breathed in all sincerity: and flinging himself back in his chair, he lay open-eyed and still, while night slipped silently on toward morning.

Brutus made one or two attempts to attract his master's attention by means of a moist nose and an urgent paw; and failing, returned philosophically to the hearth-rug.

The lamp burned low, and lower, till the room reeked with fumes of kerosene. This minor discomfort roused Lenox. He lit two candles, blew out the lamp, and throwing aside his mess jacket, yawned and stretched himself extensively. By this time one craving outweighed all others. Every nerve in him ached for the respite of sleep; and his one chance lay in succumbing to mental or physical exhaustion.

He sat down to the table, and took up his pen, determined to write till it dropped from his fingers. But here also defeat confronted him. For although his subconscious brain was discomfortably alert and voluble, ordered consecutive thought refused to come at his bidding.

He gave it up at length for the simpler expedient of pacing to and fro in the measured mechanical fashion most conducive to weariness of mind and body. But though weariness came in due course, and the weight of all time hung heavy on his eyelids, sleep held pitilessly aloof from his brain.

For the greater part of two hours the man held out. Then his face hardened; and he turned deliberately to a combined book-shell and cupboard that hung on the wall. From the cupboard he took a dark slender bottle labelled chlorodyne; and seating it on the table, fetched a glass and water-bottle from the bedroom.

That done, he poured himself out a dose far exceeding the normal allowance, and diluted it with the least admissible amount of water.

He drank the mixture slowly, savouring its sweetness and warmth; its uncanny power to soothe and bless. But as he set down the glass revulsion took hold of him; and on the heels of revulsion came self-scorn. This last roused him like the prick of a spur: for to men of Eldred Lenox's calibre, self-respect is the oxygen of the soul. The spirit of his grandfather had "scored a point" to-night. But such an achievement must not be risked again.

With the same deliberation that had marked all his former movements, Lenox picked up the bottle, emptied its sluggish contents down one of those primitive sluices that are to be found in every Indian bungalow, and returned, still absently holding it between his finger and thumb. A confession of weakness: there is no denying it. But let him who has not yet found the devil's chink in his own defences cast the stone. Head, heart, or heel—there is a weak spot in the strongest. Not even Achilles' self was plunged wholesale into the waters of immunity.

Quite suddenly Lenox realised that he was still holding the bottle: and for some unfathomable reason the trivial detail acted as a fuse that fires the magazine. For the first time that night, unreasoning anger mastered him: anger against himself; against the whole tragi-comical scheme of things: against the man whose dead sins he was called upon to expiate in his own living flesh.

A curse forced its way between his teeth; and he flung the unoffending scrap of glass into the open hearth, where it clinked and shivered into a hundred splinters, filling the room with the strong sickly odour of the drug.

Then he went back again to the long chair; limbs and brain weighted with a luxury of weariness. Shattered hope; a life-and-death struggle ahead:—the words held no meaning for him now. His lids fell. The balm of Nirvana shrouded his senses, blotting out thought, as sea mists, rolling landward, obliterate all things.

The June morning broke in one sheet of gold. Creeping in through the interstices of lowered "chicks," it emphasised the untidy, up-all-night aspect of the room; the sharp lines, pencilled by pain and struggle, on the sleeper's face, where he lay full length, in shirt-sleeves and scarlet waistcoat, unhooked and flung open before weariness overpowered him.

A deep sound, persistently repeated, at last invaded and dispelled the drugged torpor of his brain: the voice of Zyarulla murmuring: "Sahib—Sahib," with the regularity of a minute-gun.

Lenox stirred, yawned, and looked blankly about him, as though he had waked in another world. Then remembrance sprang at him, like a wild thing upon its prey: and his lids fell again heavily. In that first moment of consciousness he understood why men of proven honour and courage have been known to take liberties with the laws of life and death.

Zyarulla, entering soundlessly, set down the chota hassri on a small table at his master's elbow without betraying his surprise and concern by so much as the flicker of an eyelash. For not even your immaculate family butler can excel, in dignity and true reserve, a bearer of the old school, whose Sahib stands only second to his God, and who would almost as soon think of defiling his caste as of entering another man's service. We have educated the grand old ideal of service out of our own land; and we are fast educating it out of India also: though it remains an open question whether the good wrought by over-civilisation can honestly be said to counterbalance the evil. A question few Anglo-Indians will be found to answer in the affirmative.

Lenox poured out his tea, and drank it thirstily. But the first mouthful of toast was enough for him. He pushed the plate away; and his hand went out instinctively to the pipe Zyarulla, had laid beside it.

"Damn!" he muttered between his teeth, almost flinging it from him; and at that instant the door opened.

"Desmin, Sahib argya," [1] the Pathan announced; and with a startled sound, Lenox got upon his feet, and began fastening his waistcoat.

"Good morning," he said quietly. "Made a night of it, as you see; and overslept myself."

But beneath his quiet he was acutely aware of the contrast between his own dishevelled aspect, and Desmond's unobtrusive neatness and freshness.

"Hope I don't intrude," the latter apologised, smiling: but his keen eyes searched the other's face, and read tragedy there. "As you hadn't turned up by ten-thirty, my wife was afraid something might have gone wrong. So I came over to set her mind at rest!"

"Your wife? Why, of course! And I promised to be round by ten—ill-mannered cur that I am!" He sank wearily into his chair. "Truth is," he added in a changed tone, "I couldn't get a wink of sleep till near dawn; and then it came down on me like a sledge-hammer. You know the sort of thing."

Desmond nodded, and took a seat on the edge of the table.

"Are you often given that way?" he asked with seeming unconcern.

"Now and again."

"Ever been really bad with it?"

"Pretty bad. Why d'you ask?"

"Because from the looks of you, I should say it was wearing your nerves to fiddle-strings. Ever take anything for it?"

Lenox frowned; and Desmond made haste to add: "No call, of course, to answer a question of that sort. But you look downright ill; and it's unwise to let that kind of thing become a habit."

"Damned unwise!" Lenox answered, with a smile that did not lift the shadow from his eyes. "As I know to my cost. The thing has been a habit with me for longer than I care to reckon."

Desmond raised his eyebrows. He had noticed the fragments in the fender: the faint suggestion of chlorodyne that still clung in the air.

"My dear Lenox, I am sorry for that. And—the remedy? You must have tried something before now?"

"Yes. Drugged tobacco:—opium, a good strong mixture," the other answered bluntly. "You may as well have it straight. You're an understanding fellow; and no Pharisee."

Then, in a few clipped sentences, he stated the bald facts of the case, culminating in his discovery of the previous night. He leaned forward in speaking; elbows on knees; eyes averted from the other's face.

"You see, it's in the blood,—that's the hell of it all," he concluded fiercely. "This morning, when I'd had my fill of thinking things out, I took a stiff dose of chlorodyne. Smashed the bottle afterwards, in disgust. But where's the use? The dice are loaded: and no doubt one will be driven back to it again, sooner or later."

Words and tone betrayed the dread note of fatalism—the moral microbe of the East. But men of Theo Desmond's calibre rarely succumb to its paralysing influence.

"Look here, Lenox,"—he spoke almost brusquely,—"you must get quit of that notion. No man worth his salt goes to meet failure half-way. I grant you're on the edge of an ugly pit, and if you insist on peering into it, your chance is gone. All you have to do is to shut your eyes, and hang to the reins like the very deuce; if it's only for the sake of—your wife. Honor told me about her," he added, with more gentleness.

But Lenox threw up his head impatiently. "My wife?" he repeated on a note of concentrated bitterness. "The greatest kindness I could do her would be to plunge wholesale into the pit, and give her back the freedom she wants. A man with a taint in his blood has no business to beget children foredoomed to fight—and lose."

"My good chap," Desmond broke in hotly. "I'll never believe that any living soul is foredoomed to lose. The chance of a fight, no matter how heavy the odds, includes the chance of victory. And even if things do look a bit hopeless for a time, our orders are plain and straight; 'No surrender.'"

Lenox searched his face.

"Ever been through the fire yourself?"

Desmond nodded.

"I suppose moat of us have to go through hell once or twice," he said quietly. "And I know how it feels to wish that some one would lock up my revolver."

For answer Lenox got up and paced the room, head down; hands plunged deep into trouser-pockets; lost, by now, to all sense of his incongruous appearance.

The other watched him thoughtfully. Then his hand went to his breast-pocket, and drew out a leather case. A man proffers tobacco to a friend in trouble as instinctively as a woman proffers a caress.

"Have a cheroot?" he said, holding them out: and Lenox checked his pacing.

"Thanks,—no. I've no taste for 'em. Never had."

"Better cultivate it, then. These are A1 Havannahs. A passing extravagance. Good to begin upon. I'd drop pipes for a time, if I were you. When it comes to breaking a habit, association is the devil. And whatever happens, don't let this heredity bogey get the upper hand of you. The taint you speak of is no more, as yet, than inherited tendency: and this accident—if you believe in accident, I don't—gives you the chance of killing the snake in the egg. Now light up, there's a good chap; just to keep me company."

Lenox helped himself with a wry face; lit the cigar, and continued his walk. The iron had bitten into his soul: and, at the moment, he was incapable of gratitude. Bit by bit brain and body were adjusting themselves to the new outlook, the new demands enforced upon them; and the process was not a pleasant one.

Suddenly he drew up, and faced his companion.

"You can leave me out of the reckoning now for Chumba and Kajiar," he said abruptly. "I'm in no mood for that sort of foolery. I'll stay here and grind at this book of mine instead. You must excuse me to Mrs Desmond; and tell her just as much of the truth as you think fit."

But before he had finished speaking, Desmond was on his feet, decision in every line of him.

"Not if I know it, my dear fellow! You won't get a stroke of work done just at present; and 'that sort of foolery,' as you call it, will do you all the good in the world. Your best chance is to get right outside yourself; and we'll make it our business to keep you there—Honor and I."

At that Lenox turned huskily away; and his broken attempt at a laugh was not good to hear.

"Damn it all, man, why don't you leave me alone, to go to the devil in my own way? What can it matter to you, or to any one, whether I break myself in pieces, or am merely broken on the wheel?"

Desmond's quick ear detected emotion beneath the ungraciousness of speech and tone; and following him, he laid a hand on his shoulder, a friendly liberty to which Lenox was little accustomed.

"Come along home with me," he said quietly. "Stay for tiffin, and talk it all out with my wife. She'll be able to answer you far better than I can. Nothing like a woman's sympathy to put a dash of conceit back into a man. Will you follow on? Or shall I wait while you change?"

For an instant Lenox stood silent; then, greatly to his own surprise, he held out his hand.

"I'll be ready in ten minutes," was all he said.

An hour later, Desmond rode away from Terah Cottage, leaving Lenox and his wife alone together. He had promised to give her what help he could in the delicate task she had set her heart upon: and he belonged to the satisfactory type of man who may be counted upon for good measure, pressed down, and running over.

[1] Has come.

BOOK II.-JUST IMPEDIMENT.

CHAPTER IX.

"So many men; so many loves."
—M. O. Willcocks.

A dinner of native dishes served on leaves—to each guest his own portion on his own leaf—eaten picnic-fashion on a Kashmir carpet in the presence of twelve regally reproachful chairs, is a form of entertainment only to be met with in India; and when, to these incongruities, is added the crowning one that the host may not defile himself by sharing the meal with his guests, you have a situation typical of the land where all things are possible.

Prompted by Colonel Mayhew, the Chumba Rajah, a shy taciturn boy of sixteen, had despatched a formal invitation, hoping that the Residency party would honour him with their company at the Palace on the evening of their arrival from Dalhousie; though in truth he wished them anywhere else in the world; and Colonel Mayhew, who was by no means too old to enjoy a spasmodic daylight flirtation with a woman of Quita's intelligence, had devised the native menu mainly for her delectation.

A large sheet, promoted to the rank of tablecloth, covered the carpet, while ten cushions apologised for the absence of chairs. A bowl of roses, rigidly arranged in alternate lines of flower and fern, filled the room with fragrance. In front of each guest a snowy dome of rice, ringed about with a strange assortment of curries, gleamed on a silver salver. A quaint array of flat baskets held fragments of roast chicken and kid; unleavened cakes of a peculiarly greasy nature did duty for bread; and the only concessions to civilisation were knives and forks, table-napkins, and champagne.

"Why shouldn't we have the courage of our barbarism, and do without knives and forks as well?" Quita had suggested airily, at the outset; and a faint look of horror convulsed Mrs Mayhew's bird-like face.

Her husband saw it, and came promptly to her aid.

"No forks, no champagne!" he retorted, laughing; and Quita picked up her fork straightway.

"Hobson's choice!" she said, in a tone of mock resignation. "It would be sheer brutality to deprive six men of champagne!"

She was sitting now on a cushion, at the Resident's right hand, feet tucked away under her skirts, and a napkin laid across her knee. On this she had set a leaf piled with saffron-tinted rice, which she was exploring eagerly for incidental sultanas and yellow lumps of sugar, exchanging bulletins, from time to time, with Desmond, who had taken her in to dinner, and in whom she speedily recognised a morning quality of mind that matched her own.

Lenox, sitting opposite between Honor and Elsie, acutely aware that his legs were too long for the occasion, almost forgot the torment of the past week in looking and listening, and wondering how he had ever attained even a passing hold upon a spirit so lightly poised, so compact of volatile essences, that he shrank, almost with awe, from the bare thought of subjecting her uncaptured loveliness to the pains and penalties of marriage. He sat for the most part in silence; content to let the ripple of her voice and laughter play over him like water over parched earth. Her voice had drawn him irresistibly from the first. It was a thing of exquisite modulations. It thrilled like a caress. Its clear, cool tones, pure from passion, intoxicated him like the rarefied atmosphere of the heights. Once or twice she flung him a question or a remark, as if compelling him to be aware of her existence. He answered her with grave politeness, and an occasional direct look, before which her eyes fell, as if dazzled by a helio-flash from the man's inner fire.

All these things Honor Desmond noted; and, by the searchlight of her womanhood, discerned more than Quita herself had yet realised.

Garth, from his uncoveted post of honour at Mrs Mayhew's left hand, noted them also; but with less of understanding. Stung to irritation by a sense of vague happenings in which he counted for nothing, and by the fact that Quita was evidently enjoying herself far more than the occasion seemed to warrant, he was in no mood to do justice to the supreme event of the day—his dinner. Strange foods, too, were an abomination to his clockwork order of mind; and when, in addition, he found himself condemned to eat them sitting cross-legged on the ground, a leaf balanced precariously on one knee, he began to entertain grave doubts as to the comparative values of the game and the candle.

He quite resented the manifest contentment of Elsie Mayhew and her partner, who sat facing him, absorbed in the low-toned talk of incipient lovers, blind and deaf to the insignificant doings around them. Nor was he greatly blest in his left-hand partner, Bathurst, the Rajah's tutor—a clean-limbed athlete of the two-adjective genus, who discoursed complacently of "bags," "mounts," and handicaps; the staple topics of his kind. And while the stream of words flowed on, unchecked by his flagrant inattention, Garth's ears were tantalised by snatches of talk from the lively end of the table, where Desmond and Quita were behaving like two children; by the silver quality of her laughter that whipped his senses, while it lulled his conscience like a narcotic, and set him devising a moonlight stroll with her later on, in the Palace courtyard, by way of compensation for present martyrdom endured on her account. For since the night of the dance she had been so uniformly gracious, that he was beginning to regard his rebuff on Dynkund as little more than a delicate prelude to surrender after all.

Such absorbing reflections made him so neglectful of his hostess, that the little lady's spasmodic efforts to enliven him with spiced snippets of gossip—more than one item of which had emanated from himself—fizzled out dismally, long before the meal was over; and it was with an audible sigh of relief that she glanced across at Mrs Desmond, and got upon her feet with as much dignity as a cushion, a plump figure, and cramped limbs would allow.

"What? You do not desert us?" Quita asked, as Desmond offered her his arm.

"No—I do not desert you!" He spoke lightly, but significance lurked in his tone. "The Rajah and his suite are waiting to receive us in the Durbar Hall, and unless you object to my cigar, or send me to the right-about, I claim you as my prisoner of war for the evening!"

"À la bonheur! Smoke as much as you please. You will not need to tie a thread round my ankle, I promise you. Why didn't I get to know you sooner?"

"Perhaps because you discovered metal more attractive?"

The light thrust drew blood. She flushed, and laughed uneasily.

"A palpable hit! I might retaliate with a coal of fire in the shape of a compliment. But you don't deserve it. Anyway, let's make up for lost time now. I have a feeling that we shall be good friends, only . . . ."

"Only—what?"

"Mrs Desmond may disapprove of me."

"You'd not say that if you knew her better," he answered, warmly. "She isn't one of your good women who make a hobby of disapproval."

"That's a mercy! It is the pet vice of the virtuous; and Mrs Mayhew deals in it largely. No doubt it keeps her happy, and makes her feel superior; and I wouldn't rob my worst enemy of such a heavenly sensation! I'm sorry for her to-night, though. She hates natives almost as much as Colonel Mayhew loves them; and I'm afraid she's not envying herself; nor will poor Elsie, if Captain Lenox makes her a prisoner of war for the evening! He hardly vouchsafed her half a dozen words through dinner."

"Lenox is no conversationalist," Desmond answered, looking straight before him. "But he is a splendid fellow—worth fifty of your drawing-room acrobats."

"You like him so much, then?"

"I do more than that. I admire him."

"You are an enthusiast!"

The shadow of change in her tone did not escape him.

"Is that also one of the vices you detest?"

"But, no! I gave you credit for more discernment. Enthusiasts and idealists are the salt of the earth. That's why I want to know more of you. There! In spite of myself I have crowned you with a coal of fire after all! Now, please introduce me to our resplendent Rajah Sahib. I am going to make him talk. Colonel Mayhew has dared me to succeed!"

They entered the Durbar Hall as she spoke—a long room overloaded with gilt furniture, gilt-framed mirrors, and the inevitable chandeliers and musical boxes that are the insignia of semi-civilised opulence throughout India. No self-respecting Maharajah, or Rana, or Nawab would dream of living in a Palace devoid of either.

Rajah Govind Singh and his four companions stood together by a marble-topped table, laughing and whispering over a book filled with photographs of music-hall celebrities, while beside it a spurious album, whose heart was a musical box, tinkled an age-old air from "Les Cloches" with maddening precision. At the far end of the room a native conjurer had established himself, and was already performing indefatigably for the benefit of no one in particular.

The group by the table showed a medley of colour quite in keeping with the flash and glitter of the whole. Over spotless shirts and trousers the boys wore brilliant silk chogas[1] cunningly patterned with gold wire, and surmounted by turbans of palest primrose, orange, and green. But Govind Singh, by divine right of Rajahdom, eclipsed the rest. Beneath his scarlet coat gleamed a waistcoat of woven gold, and the jewelled buckle of his Rajput chuprass.[2] Three strings of pearls formed a close collar at his throat, and in front of his sea-green turban a heron's plume sprang from a cluster of brilliants. The faces of all were no darker than ripe wheat; for your high-caste hill-man never takes colour, like his brother of the plains.

They had long since eaten their own simple dinner, in the scantiest clothing, and in a solemn silence, squatting on a bare mud floor. For to the Hindu a meal is a sacred ceremony, and the Sahib's idiosyncrasy for making merry over his food can only be accepted as part and parcel of his bewildering lack of sense and dignity in regard to the conduct of life.

During a long minority this boy had been zealously inoculated with Western knowledge and Western points of view; and with the deceptive pliancy of the Oriental he had smilingly submitted to the process. But deep down in the unplumbed heart of him he waited for the good day when he would be rid of these well-meaning interlopers,—tireless as their own fire-carriages,—who troubled the still waters of life and talked so vigorously about nothing in particular; when he would be free to forget cricket and polo and futile efforts to cleanse the State from intrigue; free to sit down in peace and grow fat, unhindered by the senseless machinations of the outer world.

And in the heart of Govind Singh you have a fair epitome of the great heart of India herself: aloof, long-suffering, illogical to a degree inconceivable by Western minds; ready to lavish deep-hearted devotion upon individual Nicholsons and Lawrences when they come her way; yet, for all her surface submission and progress, not an inch nearer to racial sympathy, or to the inner significance of English life and character than she was fifty years ago.

But, in the meanwhile, our concern is with a minor Maharajah, and his passion for musical boxes.

At the Resident's approach, the laughter and whispering ceased; and the four boys endured with impassive politeness the mysterious rite of introduction. The tinkling album gave Quita her cue. She insisted on hearing its entire repertoire, which was mercifully limited; and her natural ease of manner, her knack of plunging whole-heartedly into the subject of the moment, soon put Govind Singh's shyness to flight. He deserted monosyllables for clipped, hurried sentences, jerked out with an odd mixture of nervousness and self-satisfaction. Quita flashed a smile at Desmond, who stood sentry at her elbow, in seeming ignorance of the fact that Garth was making tentative attempts to usurp his place.

"You must show me some of the others, Rajah Sahib," she declared, as the complacent album clicked into silence, "and when I go home to England I will hunt you up a new kind to add to your collection!"

The boy's eyes lost their look of lazy indifference; a gleam of superb teeth illumined his face.

"An upright grand is the last trifling addition to it, Miss Maurice," Colonel Mayhew informed her, "but the Rajah was a little disappointed when he found that it couldn't be set going by the turning of a key."

"I am liking the big noise—the big tamasha," the young monarch explained in all gravity. "And I think that one is too much price for a box that will do nothing unless somebody knows to make it speak."

"Mrs Desmond can make it speak for you, Rajah Sahib," Colonel Mayhew suggested; and the boy turned upon her with shy eagerness.

"Can you really do a tune?" he asked.

"Several tunes!" she answered, smiling. "A big noise, if you like."

"Oh, that is very good business. Thanks awfully."

He spoke the slang phrases, picked up from Bathurst, with mechanical precision; and Honor, still smiling, went over to the piano—a flamboyant instrument of rosewood and gold. After a second of hesitation Lenox followed, opened it for her, and resting a hand on the gilt back of her chair, bent down to speak to her before she began to play. The suggestion of intimacy in his attitude was not lost on Quita, who saw it all, without glancing in their direction. Her lips tightened; and she started slightly when Desmond spoke to her.

"Will you go round the musical boxes with me?" he asked, in an undertone that bordered on tenderness. For he saw that something in her suffered, whether it were pride or love.

"But yes—by all means," she answered, with a lift of her head which suggested to Desmond a jerk on the curb-chain. In moving off together they passed close to Garth. But Quita, who was abstractedly opening and closing her fan, did not seem aware of his presence; and he stood looking after them—nonplussed and inwardly blaspheming. He did not hold the key to this new phase of the situation.

Mrs Mayhew—noting his detachment from the Palace group, and quite needlessly alarmed lest politeness should impel him to return to her—sought out a strategic seat near the piano; though in truth Honor Desmond's masterly rendering of Chopin's heroic polonaise was, for her, no more than a complicated tumult of sound without sense, and her wrapt expression resulted from the fact that she was debating whether her durzi could possibly reproduce at sight the subtle simplicity of Mrs Desmond's evening gown. For she had sons growing up at home—this insignificant woman, whose plump proportions and bird-like eyes had earned her the nickname of "the Button Quail"; and even a good appointment did not annul the vagaries of the rupee, which was behaving peculiarly ill just then. In the intervals of imaginary dressmaking, she was enjoying shrewd speculations as to the nature and extent of the budding "affair" between the two at the piano; for her small mind clung tenaciously to the Noah's Ark view of life. Also it seemed that Elsie's own "little affair" was assuming quite a promising aspect. Personally, she disliked the man, but his talent was undeniable. She supposed he must be making money by it; and he was quite clearly making a right-of-way into her daughter's heart.

They had drifted apart from the rest without need of spoken suggestion; and now, under cover of Honor's music, which produced a tendency to gravitate towards the piano, the man grew bolder.

"There is moonlight out in the courtyard," he said, very low; and he tried, without success, to look into her eyes. "Que dítes-vous? Shall we go?"

She did not answer at once. A new spirit of boldness was awake in her, urging her to take hold of her golden hour with both hands, nothing doubting. But the man, even when he charmed her most, failed to inspire her trust. And while she stood hesitating, his gaze never left her face.

"Are you thinking it would scandalise la petite mère?"

"It might. She is easily scandalised!"

"But you would like to come?"

"Yes—I would like to come."

"Eh bien—that is enough."

"Is it?"

She looked up at him now with those great, truthful eyes of hers, which he found oddly disconcerting at times.

"Enough for me, at all events!" he answered boldly. "Come!"

And she came.

The flagged quadrangle, walled in with darkness and worn with the tread of numberless women's feet, showed silver-grey in the light of a moon nearing the full; and above it, in a square patch of sky, stars sparkled with a veiled radiance like diamonds caught in a film of gossamer. As Elsie emerged from the shadow of the verandah, she had a sense of stepping into an unreal world, and the Palace walls, shutting out the familiar contours of earth, strengthened the illusion. The night seemed the accomplice of her mood, in league with her own exquisite sensibility; a night created for sheltering tenderness.

Michael Maurice, divining her sensations with the uncanny accuracy of his type, pressed a little closer to her as they walked, so that now and again, as if by chance, his arm brushed her own, and each contact quickened her happy commotion of heart and pulse. They came upon a rough stone bench, and he paused.

"It is pleasanter to sit, n'est-ce pas?"

"Yes. But we mustn't sit long."

"Mustn't we? How does one measure time on such a night as this? By the beating of hearts, or by the pulsations of stars?"

She laughed softly.

"How foolish you are!"

"It is good to be foolish at the right time, and with the right person! Wisdom is the death's-head at the feast of life. But we are going to shut her outside the door for a whole week—you and I."

The strangely sweet magic of those linked pronouns stirred Elsie as never before; though the sound of them had pleased her once, not a little, on the lips of Kenneth Malcolm. Bud she answered lightly, as women will, when they feel barriers giving way.

"I never knew I had agreed to anything so desperate!"

He had laid his arm along the back of the seat; so that his hand was within an inch of her shoulder. He moved it closer.

"You have done more than that without knowing it—petite amie," he said, yielding himself, as always, to the witchery of the moment. "It is your doing that I have achieved an inspired picture. It is your doing that I want this week in Arcadia to be an idyll we shall neither of us forget—an idyll of sunlight, moonshine, and blessed freedom from les convenances. No past—no future—only the present; and in it two spirits tuned to one key. That is the secret of perfect enjoyment."

She shook her head.

"I don't quite understand. It sounds too fantastic. The past and the future are there always. One can't get rid of them."

"But one can shut the door on them when they threaten to disturb the present, which is the great reality after all."

"Can one? You seem to have a talent for shutting doors!"

"A convenient talent; worth cultivating! You may take my word for it."

Something in the statement or its manner of utterance jarred, ever so slightly,—threatened to break the charm that held her.

"Dangerously convenient," she murmured, in gentle reproof.

"Little Puritan! What a narrow track you walk upon. Hardly room on it for two abreast. Is there?"

The last words were almost a whisper. He pressed nearer, bringing his face close to hers. At the same moment she felt a light touch on her shoulder, and drawing back to escape the disturbing eloquence of his eyes, she discovered the presence of his encircling arm. The discovery brought her to her feet—flushed, palpitating, aquiver with anger at this first shadow of insult to her maidenhood.

"Will you take me in again, please?" she said quietly, and the request savoured of command. For her gentle nature was founded on a rock; and a very little below the unresisting surface one came upon adamant, pure and simple. But the unabashed Frenchman caught one of her hands, and crushed it against his lips.

"Petite amie—forgive me! I was overbold. I am not fit to touch the hem of your dress. But one is only flesh and blood; and you . . . say you are not angry with me, in your heart . . . ."

She drew her hand away decisively; and with unconscious cruelty rubbed the back of it against her dress, as if to remove a stain.

"I am angry—I have a right to be angry," she answered in the same toneless voice. "And if you will not come in with me, I shall go alone."

He rose then; and they crossed the enchanted courtyard together—a clear foot of space between them.

The brilliance of the Durbar Hall smote the girl painfully. It was as though the light had power to penetrate and reveal her hidden perturbation. Without looking up, she felt her mother's eyes upon her; and the wild-rose tint of her cheeks deepened under their scrutiny. But she avoided meeting them, and, going straight to her father, slipped a small hand under his arm. She felt indefinably in need of protection, not only from the man, whose kiss had moved her more than he guessed, but from herself, and the new emotions quickening at her heart; and in all times of trouble she turned spontaneously to her father. He was the true parent of her spirit; and, but for the matter-of-fact, half-condescending devotion of three boys at home, Mrs Mayhew might, at times, have felt left out in the cold.

"Enjoying yourself, little girl?" the father asked, smiling down at her.

"Yes, of course, dear—ever so much," she replied, with brave untruthfulness; and the lie must have been forgiven her in heaven.

But the veil of enchantment was rent; and no needle of earth has ever been ground fine enough to draw its frayed edges together.

[1] Long loose coats.

[2] Cross-belt.

CHAPTER X.

"Woman, I grope to find you; but I cannot,
O, is there no way to you, and no path,—
No winding path!"
—S. Phillips.

And the good folk of Chumba,—men, women, and children,—were early astir on this June day, in whose fiery lap lay hid the luck of the State for the coming year.

The stone streets of the little town, so steep as to be cut out, here and there, into a rough semblance of steps, were alive with quickly moving figures, in holiday attire: which, in the East, is a true outward and visible sign of its wearer's inward and spiritual sense of festivity.

Open shop fronts and quaintly carven balconies were noisy with shrill voices. Every self-respecting house was plastered with fresh mud; every window and doorway garlanded with marigold and jasmine buds; every brain, absorbed in the paramount speculation, as to how the sacrificial buffalo would behave.

At three o'clock, under a blazing sun, the Rajah set out, enthroned on his State elephant, whose silver howdah and gala trappings formed a fitting pedestal for the red and gold magnificence of the young prince himself. Two ropes of pearls hung down to his waist: a huge uncut emerald made a vivid incident of green upon his gilded chest: and the diamond aigrette, surmounting his turban of palest green muslin, flashed and quivered in the sunshine, like living fire. The Resident, in immaculate grey suit and tall white helmet, sat beside him in the awkwardly swaying howdah with an admirable air of comfort and unconcern; and their triumphal progress was enlivened by the brazen cheerfulness of trumpets and trombones, the melancholy squeal of bagpipes, and the ear-piercing shriek of native instruments; while, through all, and above all, and under all, the throbbing of innumerable tom-toms suggested the heart-beats of the mighty crowd made audible.

Journeying thus, along the unshadowed road that overhangs the river, they came at length to the promontory itself. Here, beneath the huge State shamianah, gaily coloured Kashmir rugs were spread, for Govind Singh and his court: while curtained enclosures, set at duly decorous distance, concealed the women-folk, who had been conveyed thither under close cover much earlier in the day.

Through the surging chattering crowd,—which fell back right and left before their quietly determined advance,—the Residency party made their way in to the partial shade of the shamianah, wherein chairs had been set for the English guests; four on either side of the Palace group.

It was a very dignified Elsie who slid to the ground before Maurice could get to her, and carefully avoided his reproachful gaze. But he followed her into the tent, and took his seat beside her unrebuked. The trifling incident of the night before had increased not merely her charm but her value in his eyes. If this were not the 'real thing,' he reflected, in a virtuous glow of self-approval, then surely there could be no reality on earth.

At this moment he became aware that Garth and Mrs Desmond were established in the two neighbouring chairs. His surprise at this unexpected conjunction showed so plainly in his face that Honor, meeting his glance, responded with dimplings of sheer enjoyment before devoting herself to the entertainment of her victim.

Desmond, in pursuance of a policy which at least saved Lenox from the sharpest sting of all, had managed to ride close behind Quita and Garth; and being nimbler in dismounting than the older man, had successfully usurped his privilege of lifting her from the saddle. She herself, though not a little puzzled as to the meaning of it all, was beginning to relish the humour of the game; and as Desmond escorted her into the tent, she turned upon him a smile of unabashed amusement.

"This is flattering! I appear to have made a conquest of Monsieur le
Capitaine!"

"And for once appearances are not deceitful," he capped her straight.

"How enchantingly direct you are! But at this rate Mrs Desmond really will disapprove. . ."

"No fear! Mrs Desmond is enjoying it quite as much as I am!"

She divined a hidden meaning in his words: but merely lifted her eyebrows and shoulders in characteristic fashion.

"Well—it she doesn't object, I am sure I don't!"

"Nor I, by any means. . . . Come this way."

He led her across the tent, having noted and admired his wife's skilful bit of strategy: and Lenox instinctively took the same direction.

Quita chose the chair farthest from the Palace group; and in a few moments, she knew that her husband was standing close behind her. It was the first time he had deliberately approached her since their encounter at the ball: and the silent tribute, so characteristic of the man, elated her with a renewed sense of power over a personality immeasurably stronger than her own. It was like bringing down big game after the mild diversion of shooting pheasants. But he had spent the whole morning in the verandah with Honor Desmond; and the remembrance still rankled. Upset her equanimity as he might, the spirit of surrender was still far from her.

At his approach Desmond made a slight movement, as if to rise; but the other shook his head. It was enough to be thus close to her, to feel that speech was possible, yet not compulsory. All of which Desmond was quick to understand.

"Look, . . look . . ." Quita whispered suddenly, leaning towards him.
"They are forcing that poor brute to the edge. He has been in before.
Colonel Mayhew told me. He knows; . . . he is afraid. Oh, mon Dieu,
how horrible! . . . He is over!"

A mighty shout from the assembled thousands, who stood ten and twenty deep along the banks, confirmed her words. The shuddering victim had been forced over the ten-foot drop; and for a few breathless moments, was lost in the green swirling water. A second shout,—unanimous, as from one Gargantuan throat,—heralded the reappearance of the flat black head, with its dilated nostrils held well above the blinding wreaths of foam. Tossed mercilessly from boulder to boulder, the stout swimmer neared the first big rapid; and a moment later was swept, an unresisting log, into its treacherous clutches. Out of it he plunged, still swimming valiantly; and, despite the opposing force of the current, made a bold dash for one of the few possible landings on the town bank. But the people, foreseeing the attempt from long experience, were gathered at this particular danger-point in overwhelming numbers; with the result that the unhappy beast was fairly hustled back into the boiling stream.

Here the second rapid claimed him; and excitement became intense; for the fate of a year hung trembling in the balance. There was no shouting now; but a breathless expectant silence. Only the river,—full of sound and fury,—babbled unceasingly to the majestic sky.

The moment of uncertainty was short as it was tense. Once more the brave black head appeared, a blot on the foam-flecked surface, no longer battling, with dilated nostrils, against fearful odds; but lying sideways, inert . . . lifeless; . . . and a prolonged outburst of shouting, clapping, and huzzaing informed the echoing hills that the great spirit of rivers and streams had accepted the sacrifice; that the luck of the State was established for twelve good months to come.

"Poor beast, poor plucky beast!" Quita murmured rebelliously. Her sympathies had been strangely stirred; and an unbidden moisture clouded her eyes. In that hapless drowned buffalo she beheld, not a mere dead animal, but one victim the more to the eternal law of sacrifice;—the law that makes one man's suffering the price of another man's gain;—the law that lies at the root of half the tragedy of the world. "How happy they all are!" she went on. "That Rajah boy is delighted. They have no imaginations these people. So much the better for them!"

By now the shamianah hummed with talk and laughter and congratulation on the outcome of the Mèla. Every one had risen; and Desmond turned with the rest to add his quota to the polite speeches that were the order of the moment.

But Quita, still intent upon the stirring scene without, moved forward a little space to obtain a better view of the river and the crowd. Lenox followed her; and with a start she became aware that he was standing almost at her elbow; though still a little behind her, so that she must turn if she wanted to see his face.

"Are you wishing you could put some of that on canvas?" he asked in a voice that he vainly strove to render natural.

"Yes. It would be such a triumphant riot of colour. But I'm afraid it would look crude and impossible in any frame except the frame of an Indian sky."

She did not turn in speaking; but the softness of her voice soothed his chafed spirit like a benediction, and robbed him for the moment of all power to reply.

"I was really trying to stamp it all on my memory," she went on after a pause. "It is a sight one doesn't see twice in a lifetime. Just for a few seconds it was terrible. But I would not have missed it for the world."

"Nor I. Now that I am here, I feel grateful to the Desmonds for persuading me to come."

"Did they have to drag you here by main force?"

"Not quite! I thought I had better stay and grind at my book; that was all. But they wouldn't hear of it."

"Do you always obey their orders implicitly?" There was veiled scorn in her tone, and a new warmth in his as he replied:

"I would do any mortal thing they asked me to, within reason. In all my life no two people have been so good to me."

"You evidently admire her very much." The stress on the pronoun was too delicate to catch his notice.

"I do, immensely. How could any man in his senses do otherwise? Or, for that matter, any woman either? I hoped—I thought—you would have been good friends with her."

He spoke his honest enthusiasm in the simple desire that she should share it. But her nerves were still strung to concert pitch, and he had struck the wrong note.

"You thought her many virtues might have an improving effect on me, I suppose?"

The acorn was no longer veiled: and he winced under it.

"No: only is occurred to me that the two . . . . best women I have ever known might reasonably have a good deal in common."

"It is kind of you to couple me with her. I am flattered, I assure you!—But, personally, I prefer something lees exalted, something more human, more fallible. . . ."

"Perhaps that explains your predilection for Garth?" he broke in abruptly, pricked to resentment by her persistent note of mockery.

"I am not aware that my friendship with Major Garth requires any sort of explanation."

She was rigid now—face, voice, figure: his golden opportunity gone past recall. Men pay as dearly for sins of ignorance as for the baser kinds of trespass: and the man who does not understand women is almost worse, in their esteem, that the man who treats them ill.

"Is it wise—for your own sake . . . to be so careless of your good name?" he persisted desperately; goaded by the knowledge that he would not soon get speech of her again.

"Possibly not. But I don't feel called upon to retire into a convent, or to advertise the fact that I am not . . . 'on the market.' Nor do I choose to have my conduct called in question by any man living."

She faced him now;—defiant, a bright spot on either cheek.

And before he knew how to answer her, Colonel Mayhew was upon them, overflowing with cheerful raillery, and radiantly unaware that he had stepped into a powder magazine.

Long before the returning procession reached the Residency, Quita had repented of her little-minded display of irritation, consoling herself with the resolve that she would atone for it next time; whereas Lenox had decided that for once Honor Desmond's intuition was at fault: that it needed no 'bogey of heredity' to widen the impassable gulf dividing him from his wife.

CHAPTER XI.

"O all that in me wanders, and is wild,
Gathers into one wave, and breaks on thee."
—Phillips.

In the deep heart of Kalatope Forest, where the trees fall apart as if by unanimous consent, the natural glade of Kajiar lies like a giant emerald under a turquoise sky. Peace broods over this sanctuary of Nature's making, dove-like, with folded wings. No lightest echo of the world's turmoil and strife disturbs the stillness. Only at dawn and dusk, the thin note of the temple bell, the chanting of priests, and the unearthly minor wail of conches, announce the downsitting and uprising of the little stone image of godhead, housed in a picturesque temple that nestles among low trees, beside the Holy Lake, at the southern end of the glade.

For Hindus are the most devout Nature-worshippers on the face of the earth. To them, beauty of place translates itself as God's direct cry to the soul; and in the isolated glade of Kajiar, with its sweep of shelving turf, its encircling pines and deodars, and its towering snow-peaks standing sentinel in the north,—deity reigns supreme; deity and the great grey ape of the Himalayas.

Only for one week in the year does Kajiar spring full-fledged into a place of human significance. From Dalhousie, on the one hand, and from Chumba on the other, a light-hearted crowd of revellers profanes the quiet of earth and sky. On the outskirts of the forest tents spring up, like mushrooms, in a night; the devotional voices of the temple are drowned in the clamour of bugles, the throb of racing hoofs, the challenging gaiety of the band, and the heart-stirring wail of the Royal Chumba Pipers; wiry hill-men, in kilts and tartans;—the pride of the young Rajah's heart.

The 'Kajiar week' is the central event of Dalhousie's season:—an Arcadian revel of perfumed shadow, and sun-warmed earth; a carnival of camp-life; ushering in the gloom of the Great Rains;—the triple tyranny of mist, mildew, and mackintoshes. And early on the morning after the Mèla,—while the breath of night still lingered in gorges and ravines, and in shadowed patches of the ascending path, a mixed procession of men and horses, shuffling mules, and trotting coolies wound, snake-like, out of the Chumba valley towards Kalatope Forest and the emerald glade.

All the Rajah's party was mounted, save Mrs Mayhew and the medical missionary's wife, who preferred the leisurely ease of their dandies: and in the van of the procession, a hundred yards and more in advance of it, Quita rode with James Garth.

Her husband's bearing throughout the previous evening had convinced her that their passage of arms in the shamianah had killed the budding possibility of a better understanding between them: and the fact that she was to blame, did not make the knowledge easier to bear. For she knew now—knew consciously—that she craved the love and admiration of this big silent husband of hers, as she had never yet craved anything in earth or heaven: that his mere presence disturbed every fibre of her in a fashion she had hitherto believed impossible; that his aloofness drew and held her, as no other man's ardour had ever done. These two days of closer contact, of hearing his voice, of watching, without seeming to watch, the familiar movements of his face and figure, had waked to conscious life germs that had long lain at her heart, quickening in darkness.

But pride was a stubborn element in her. Where she gave greatly, she demanded greatly. The fact that he had taken her to task bred a suspicion that she had been sought out for that purpose, not because he could no longer keep away: and his evident determination to give her no chance of retrieving the damage done in a moment of irritation, brought her near to defiance,—the danger-point of her nature. Hence renewed encouragement of Garth, with intent to italicise her Declaration of Independence; and with a half-acknowledged hope that Lenox might be goaded by jealousy to renewed remonstrance.

And Garth,—who was used to the bestowal, rather than the receipt of favours,—accepted this woman's encouragement as gratefully as an enamoured subaltern. Desmond's recent tactics had but served to convince him that the walls of Jericho must be carried by assault. Whatever the outcome, the thrill of conquest must at least be his.

The six-foot roadway up to Kajiar gave him ample excuse for riding needlessly close to his companion; and he inclined himself closer in talking, thus giving a provocative flavour to ordinary speech.

"I think, in common fairness, it is my turn for an innings again,—don't you?"

She laughed, and lifted her shoulders, evading direct reply.

"Does that mean that you care nothing, one way or other?" There was smothered passion in his tone.

"And if it does? What then?"

"Gad! How coolly you stab a poor devil, whose worst sin is that he is in——" But before the word was out, she checked him sharply.

"Major Garth!—How dare you?"

Her white-hot anger seared both his vanity and his heart. But he had courage of a sort: and he stood his ground.