Chapter 3.I.

When it became known that Madeline Anderson had finally decided to go abroad for two years, her little circle in New York naturally talked a good deal, in review, about her curious reason for never having gone before. So much that happened afterward, so much that I am going to tell, depends upon this reason for not going before, that I also must talk about it and explain it; I could never bring it out just as we went along. It would have been a curious reason in connection with anybody, but doubly so as explaining the behaviour of Miss Anderson, whose profile gave you the impression that she was anything but the shuttlecock of her emotions. Shortly, her reason was a convict, Number 1596, who, up to February in that year, had been working, or rather waiting, out his sentence in the State penitentiary. So long as he worked or waited, Madeline remained in New York, but when in February death gave him his quittance, she took her freedom too, with wide intentions and many coupons.

Earlier in his career Number 1596 had been known in New York society as Mr. Frederick Prendergast, and for a little while he was disapproved there on the score of having engaged himself to a Miss Anderson, Madeline Anderson, whom nobody knew anything about. There was her own little circle, as I have said, and it lacked neither dignity nor refinement, but I doubt whether any member of it was valeted from London, or could imply, in conversation, a personal acquaintance with Yvette Guilbert. There is no need, however, to insist that there are many persons of comfortable income and much cultivation in New York, who would not be met by strangers having what are called the ‘best’ introductions there. The best so often fails to include the better. It may be accepted that Madeline Anderson and her people were of these, and that she wondered sometimes during the brief days of her engagement what it would be like to belong to the brilliant little world about her that had its visiting list in London, Paris, or St. Petersburg, and was immensely entertained by the gaucheries of the great ones of the earth.

Then came, with the most unexceptionable introductions, Miss Violet Forde, from a Sloane Square address, London. She came leaning on the arm of a brother, the only relative she had in the world, and so brilliant was the form of these young people that it occurred to nobody to imagine that it had the most precarious pecuniary foundation, must have faded and shrivelled indeed, after another year or two of anything but hospitality as generous as that of New York. Well-nourished and undimmed, however, it concealed for them admirably the fact that it was the hospitality they were after, and not the bracing climate or the desire to see the fascinating Americans of London and Paris at home. New York found them agreeable specimens of high-spirited young English people, and played with them indefinitely. Miss Forde, when she sat imperturbably on a cushion in the middle of the floor after dinner and sang to a guitar the songs of Albert Chevalier, was an anomaly in English decorum that was as pleasing to observe as it was amusing to criticize.

The Americans she met delighted in drawing her out it was a pastime that took the lead at dinner-parties, to an extent which her hostess often thought preposterous and she responded with naïveté and vigour, perfectly aware that she was scoring all along the line. Upon many charming people she made the impression that she was a type of the most finished class of what they called ‘English society girls,’ that she represented the best they could do over there in this direction. As a matter of fact she might have sat to any of those ‘black and white’ artists, who draw townish young women of London, saying cynical things to young men in the weekly papers. That was her type, and if you look for her picture there, you will see that her face was very accurately oval, with eyes that knew their value, and other features that didn’t very much matter, except in so far as they expressed a very full conception of the satisfactions of this life, and a wide philosophy as to methods of obtaining them.

Frederick Prendergast was unacquainted with the popular pictures I have mentioned, having a very reasonable preference for the illustrated papers of his own country; otherwise there is no telling he might have observed the resemblance and escaped the State prison, whither he assuredly never would have gone had he married Madeline Anderson as he fully intended to do when Miss Forde came over. He was worth at that time a great deal of money, besides being more personable than any one would have believed who knew him as ‘1596.’ His fiancee was never too obtrusively in evidence, and if Miss Forde thought of Miss Anderson with any scruple, it was probably to reflect that if she could not take care of these things she did not deserve to have them. This at all events was how her attitude expressed itself practically; and the upshot was that Miss Anderson lost them. There came a day when Frederick Prendergast, in much discomfort of mind, took to Violet the news that Madeline had brought their engagement to an end. She, Violet, gave him some tea, and they talked frankly of the absurd misconception of the relations between them upon which his dismissal was founded; and Prendergast went away much comforted and wholly disposed to respect Miss Anderson’s startling wishes. She, with what both the others thought excellent taste, persuaded her mother and sister to move to Brooklyn; and so far as the thoroughfares and social theatres of New York were concerned, the city over the river might have been a nunnery which had closed its gates upon her. It was only in imagination that she heard Frederick Prendergast’s wedding-bells when, two months later, he was united to Miss Forde in Grace Church, and that after the fact, their melody being brought to her inner sense next day by the marriage notice in the ‘Tribune’.

It would be painful, in view of what we know of Frederick Prendergast, to dwell upon what Madeline Anderson undeniably felt. Besides her emotions were not destructively acute, they only lasted longer than any one could have either expected or approved. She suffered for him as well; she saw as plainly as he did the first sordid consequences of his mistake the afternoon he came to solicit her friendship, having lost other claims; and it was then perhaps, that her responsibility in allowing Violet Forde to spoil his life for him began to suggest itself to her. Up to that time she had thought of the matter differently, as she would have said, selfishly. He was not permitted to come again; but he went away lightened, inasmuch as he had added his burden to hers.

When a year later the national credit involved that of Prendergast’s firm, Madeline read financial articles in the newspapers with heavy concern, surprising her family with views on ‘sound money’; and when, shortly afterward, his partners brought that unhappy young man before the criminal courts for an irregular use of the firm’s signature, which further involved it beyond hope of extrication, there was no moment of the day which did not find her, in spirit, beside him there.

The case dragged on through appeal, and the decision of the lower courts was not reversed. The day this became known the fact also transpired that poor Prendergast would never live to complete his ten years’ term of imprisonment. He went to prison with hardly more than one lung, and in the most favourable physical condition to get rid of the other. Mrs. Prendergast wept a little over the installation, and assured Frederick that it was perfectly absurd; they were certain to get him out again; people always got people out again in America. She took him grapes and flowers once a week for about a month, and then she sailed for Europe. She put it about that her stay was to be as brief as was consistent with the transaction of certain necessary business in London; but she never came back, and Madeline Anderson had taken her place, in so far as the grapes and flowers were concerned, for many months, when the announcement of his wife’s death reached Prendergast in an English paper published in Paris. About a year after that it began to be thought singular how he picked up in health, and Madeline’s mother and sister occasionally romanced about the possibility of his recovering and marrying her after all they had an enormous opinion of the artistic virtue of forgiveness but it was not a contingency ever seriously contemplated by Miss Anderson herself. Her affection, pricked on by remorse, had long satisfied itself with the duties of her ministry. If she would not leave him until he died, it was because there was no one but herself to brighten the long day in the prison hospital for him, because she had thrown him into the arms of the woman who had deserted him, because he represented in her fancy her life’s only budding towards the sun. Her patience lasted through six years, which was four years longer than any doctor had given Frederick Prendergast to live; but when one last morning she found an empty bed, and learned that Number 1596 had been discharged in his coffin, she rose from the shock with the sense of a task fully performed and a well-developed desire to see what else there might be in the world.

She announced her intention of travelling for a year or two with a maid, and her family expressed the usual acquiescence. It would help her, they said, to ‘shake it off’; but they said that to one another. They were not aware and it would have spoiled an ideal for them if they had been that she had shaken it off, quite completely, into Prendergast’s grave.

This was the curious reason why Miss Anderson’s travels were so long postponed.

Chapter 3.II.

It was Madeline’s fancy to enjoy the contrast between West and East in all its sharpness, so she and Brookes embarked at San Francisco for Yokohama. Their wanderings in Japan were ideal, in spite of Brookes’s ungrateful statement that she could have done with fewer eggs and more bacon; and Madeline prolonged the appeal of the country to her sense of humour and fantasy, putting off her departure for India from week to week. She went at last in March; and found herself down with fever at Benares in the middle of one particularly hot April, two months after the last of her fellow travellers had sailed from Bombay, haunted on her baking pillow by pictorial views of the burning ghat and the vultures. The station doctor, using appalling language to her punkah-coolie, ordered her to the hills; and thus it was that she went to Simla, where she had no intention of going, and where this story really begins.

Brookes has always declared that Providence in sending Miss Anderson to Simla had it in mind to prevent a tragedy; but as to that there is room for a difference of opinion: besides I can not be anticipated by Brookes.

’It’s the oddest place imaginable, and in many ways the most delightful,’ Madeline wrote to her sister Adele, ’this microcosm of Indian official society withdrawn from all the world, and playing at being a municipality on three Himalayan mountaintops. You can’t imagine its individuality, its airy, unsubstantial, superior poise. How can I explain to you elderly gentlemen, whose faces express daily electric communications with the Secretary of State, playing tennis violently every single afternoon in striped flannels writing letters of admonition to the Amir all day long, and in the evening, with the assistance of yellow wigs and make-up sticks from the Calcutta hair-dresser, imagining that they produce things, poor dears, only a little less well done than is done at the Lyceum? Nothing is beyond them. I assure you they are contemplating at the moment ’The Second Mrs. Tanqueray’. The effect of remoteness from the world, I suppose, and the enormous mutual appreciation of people who have watched each other climb. For to arrive officially at Simla they have had to climb in more ways than one...It is all so hilarious, so high-spirited, so young and yet, my word! what a cult of official dignity underlying! I saw a staff-officer in full uniform, red and white feathers and all, going to the birthday dinner at the Viceroy’s the other evening in a perambulator rickshaw, you know, such as they have in Japan. That is typical of the place. All the honours and dignities and a perambulator to put them in or a ridiculous little white-washed house made of mud and tin, and calling itself Warwick Castle, Blenheim, Abbotsford! They haven’t a very good hold, these Simla residences, and sometimes they slip fifty yards or so down the mountain-side, but the chimneys (bad pun coming) are never any more out of drawing than they were before.

’Yet never forget the queer little place has a nobility, drawn I suppose from high standards of conduct in essentials.

’...This matter of precedence is a bore for an outsider. I am very tired of being taken in to dinner by subalterns, because I have no “official position.” Something of the kind was offered me, by the way, the other day, by a little gunner with red eyelids, in the Ordnance Department, named McDermott Captain McDermott. He took my declining very cheerfully, said he knew Americans didn’t like Englishmen, who hadn’t been taught to pronounce their “g’s,” but hoped I would change my mind before the rains, when he was goin’ down. Of course I sha’n’t. The red eyelids alone...I am living in a boarding-house precisely under the deodars, and have “tiffin” with Mrs. Hauksbee every day when neither of us are having it anywhere else. And I’ve been told the original of “General Bangs,” “that most immoral man.” You remember, don’t you, the heliograph incident I needn’t quote it. It really happened! and the General still lives, none the worse perhaps rather greater. Quite half the people seem materializations of Kipling, and it’s very interesting; but one mustn’t say so if one wants to be popular. Talking of materializations, I saw the original of Crawford’s Mr. Isaacs, too, the other day. He used to be a diamond agent among the native princes when Crawford knew him. When I saw him he was auctioning off his collection of curios and things. These types of novelists look wonderfully little impaired; I suppose it’s the dry air.

’P.S. Brookes is also quite happy. She was much struck, on arriving, by an apparent anomaly in nature. “Have you noticed, ma’am,” said she, “how at this height all the birds are crows and monkeys?"’

Miss Anderson described Simla exhaustively in her letters to New York. She touched upon almost every feature, from Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge, whose husbands were perspiring in the Plains, and nobody telling them anything, to the much larger number of ladies interested in the work of the Young Women’s Christian Association; from the ‘type’ of the Military Secretary to the Viceroy to that of Ali Buksh, who sold raw turquoises in a little carved shop in the bazaar. I should like to quote more of her letters, but if I did I should find nothing about Colonel Horace Innes, who represented she often acknowledged to herself her only serious interest. Miss Anderson took the world at its own light valuation as it came; but she had a scale of recognitions and acceptances, which she kept apart for the very few, and Innes had claimed a place in it the first time they met. It seems a trifle ungrateful that she should have left him out, since it was he who gave her a standard by which to measure the frivolity of Simla. He went to gymkhanas if he knew she was going but he towered almost pictorially above them; and when he talked to Madeline his shoulders expressed a resentment of possible interruptions that isolated him still further. I would not suggest that he was superior by conviction; he was only intent, whereas most of the other people were extremely diffused, and discriminating, while the intimacies of the rest were practically coextensive with Government House list. Neither, for his part, would he admit that the tone of Simla was as wholly flippant as I have implied. They often talked about it; he recognized it as a feature likely to compel the attention of people from other parts of the world; and one afternoon he asked her, with some directness, if she could see no tragedies underneath.

‘Tragedies of the heart?’ she asked. ’Oh, I can not take them seriously. The emotion is so ephemeral! A woman came to tea with me three days ago, and made me her confessor. It was unexpected; if it hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have asked her to tea. She was so unhappy that she forgot about the rouge, and it all came off on her handkerchief when she cried. The man likes somebody else better this season. Well, I gave her nougat and cheap cynicisms, and she allowed herself to be comforted! Why, the loves of kitchen-maids are more dignified.’

They were riding on the broad four-mile road, blasted out of the rock, that winds round Jakko. The deodars stood thick above them, with the sunlight filtering through; a thousand feet below lay the little square fields, yellow and green, of the King of Koti. The purple-brown Himalayas shouldered the eye out to the horizon, and there the Snows lifted themselves, hardly more palpable than the drifted clouds, except for a gleam of ice in their whiteness. A low stone wall ran along the verge of the precipice, and, looking down, they saw tangled patches of the white wild rose of the Himalayas, waving and drooping over the abyss.

‘I am afraid,’ said Innes, ’you are not even upon the fringe of the situation.’

‘It’s the situation as I see it.’

’Then excuse me you do not see deep enough. That poor lady suffered, I suppose, to the extent of her capacity. You would not have have increased it.’

‘I don’t know, I should have preferred not to measure it.’

’Besides, that was not quite the sort of thing I had in mind. I was thinking more of the separations.’

‘Ah!’ said Madeline.

’It’s not fair to ask women to live much in India. Sometimes it’s the children, sometimes it’s ill health, sometimes it’s natural antipathy to the place; there’s always a reason to take them away.’

‘Yes,’ said Madeline, turning a glance of scrutiny on him. His face was impassive; he was watching mechanically for a chance to slay a teasing green spider-fly.

’That is the beginning of the tragedy I was thinking of. Time does the rest, time and the aridity of separations. How many men and women can hold themselves together with letters? I don’t mean aging or any physical change. I don’t mean change at all.’

‘No,’ said Madeline, and this time, though her curiosity was greater, she did not look at him.

’No. The mind could accustom itself to expect that, and so forestall the blow, if it really would be a blow, which I doubt. For myself, I’m pretty sure that nothing of that kind could have much effect upon one’s feeling, if it were the real thing.’ He spoke practically to himself, as if he had reasoned this out many times.

‘Oh, no!’ said Madeline.

’But separation can do a worse thing than that. It can reintroduce people, having deprived them of their mutual illusion under which they married. If they lived together the illusion would go, I suppose, but custom and comfort would step in to prevent a jar. There never would be that awful revelation of indifference.’

He stopped sharply, and the hope went through Madeline’s mind that her face expressed no personal concern for him. There was a small red stain in the brown of his cheek as he looked at her to find out, and he added, ’I’ve known in Bombay one or two bad cases of that. But, of course, it is the wife who suffers most. Shall we canter on?’

‘In a minute,’ said Madeline, and he drew his rein again.

She could not let this be the last word; he must not imagine that she had seen, through the simple crystal of his convictions, the personal situation that gave them to him.

‘Of course,’ she said, thoughtfully, ’you know the Anglo-Indian world and I don’t. You must have observed this that you speak of it; it sounds only too probable. And I confess it makes my little impression very vulgar and superficial.’ She turned her head and a candid smile to him. ’All the same, I fancy that the people who are capable of suffering much that way are the exceptions. And I don’t care I believe there is more cheap sentiment in this place than the other kind. What do you think I heard a woman say the other day at a tiffin-party? “No man has touched my heart since I’ve been married,” she proclaimed, “except my husband!” At A tiffin-party!’

She heard the relief in Innes’s laugh and was satisfied.

‘How does it happen,’ he said, ’that women nowadays are critical of the world so young?’

’I shall be thirty in September, and we no longer look at society through a tambour-frame,’ she said, hardily.

’And I shall be forty-three next month, but hitherto I have known it to produce nothing like you,’ he returned, and if there was ambiguity in his phrase there was none in his face.

Miss Anderson made with her head her little smiling gesture Simla called it very American which expressed that all chivalrous speech was to be taken for granted and meant nothing whatever; and as they turned into the Ladies’ Mile gave her horse his head, and herself a chance for meditation. She thought of the matter again that evening before her little fire of snapping deodar twigs, thought of it intently. She remembered it all with perfect distinctness; she might have been listening to a telephonic reproduction.

It was the almost intimate glimpse Innes had given her of himself, and it brought her an excitement which she did not think of analyzing. She wrung from every sentence its last possibility of unconscious meaning, and she found when she had finished that it was eleven o’clock.

Then she went to bed, preferring not to call Brookes, with the somewhat foolish feeling of being unable to account for her evening. Her last reflection before she slept shaped itself in her mind in definite words.

‘There are no children,’ it ran, ’and her health has always been good, he says. She must have left him after that first six months in Lucknow, because of a natural antipathy to the country and when she condescended to come out again for a winter he met the different lady he thinks about. With little hard lines around the mouth and common conventional habits of thought, full of subservience to his official superiors, and perfectly uninterested in him except as the source of supplies. But I don’t know why I should want her to be so disagreeable.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Innes, travelling at the moment with the mails from London to Bombay, was hastening to present to Miss Anderson features astonishingly different.

Chapter 3.III.

The lady guests at Peliti’s Mrs. Jack Owen and the rest were giving a tea in the hotel pavilion. They had the band, the wife of the Commander-in-Chief, the governess from Viceregal Lodge and one little Viceregal girl, three A.D.C.’s, one member of council, and the Archdeacon. These were the main features, moving among a hundred or so of people more miscellaneous, who, like the ladies at Peliti’s, had come up out of the seething Plains to the Paradise of the summer capital. The Pavilion overhung the Mall; looking down one could see the coming and going of leisurely Government péons in scarlet and gold, Cashmiri vendors of great bales of embroideries and skins, big-turbaned Pahari horse-dealers, chaffering in groups, and here and there a mounted Secretary-sahib trotting to the Club. Beyond, the hills dipped blue and bluer to the plains, and against them hung a single waving yellow laburnum, a note of imagination. Madeline Anderson was looking at it when Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge came up with an affectionate observation upon the cut of her skirt, after which Mrs. Mickie harked back to what they had been talking about before.

‘She’s straight enough now, I suppose,’ this lady said.

’She goes down. But she gives people a good deal of latitude for speculation.’

‘Who is this?’ asked Madeline. ’I ask for information, to keep out of her way. I find I am developing the most shocking curiosity. I must be in a position to check it.’

The ladies exchanged hardly perceptible glances. Then Mrs. Gammidge said, ‘Mrs. Innes,’ and looked as if, for the moment, at any rate, she would withhold further judgment.

‘But you mustn’t avoid the poor lady,’ put in Mrs. Mickie, ’simply because of her past. It wouldn’t be fair. Besides ’

‘Her past?’ Madeline made one little effort to look indifferent, and then let the question leap up in her.

‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Gammidge, with brief impatience, ’he married her in Cairo, and she was dancing there. Case of chivalry, I believe, though there are different versions. Awful row in the regiment he had to take a year’s leave. Then he succeeded to the command, and the Twenty-third were ordered out here. She came with him to Lucknow and made slaves of every one of them. They’ll swear to you now that she was staying at Shepheard’s with an invalid mother when he met her. And now she’s accepted like everybody else; and that’s all there is about it.’

‘There’s nothing in that,’ said Madeline, determinedly, ’to prove that she wasn’t respectable.’

‘N no. Of course not,’ and again the eye of Mrs. Gammidge met that of Mrs. Mickie.

‘Though, you see love,’ added the latter lady, ’it would have been nicer for his people they’ve never spoken to him since if she had been making her living otherwise in Cairo.’

‘As a barmaid, for instance,’ said Madeline, sarcastically.

‘As a barmaid, for instance,’ repeated Mrs. Gammidge, calmly.

‘But Simla isn’t related to him Simla doesn’t care!’ Mrs. Mickie exclaimed. ’Everybody will be as polite as possible when she turns up. You’ll see. You knew, didn’t you, that she was coming out in the Caledonia?’

‘No,’ said Madeline. She looked carefully where she was going to put her coffee-cup, and then she glanced out again at the laburnum hanging over the plains. ’I I am glad to hear it. These separations you take so lightly out here are miserable, tragic.’

The other ladies did not exchange glances this time. Miss Anderson’s change of tone was too marked for comment which she might have detected.

‘Colonel Innes got the telegram this morning. She wired from Brindisi,’ Mrs. Gammidge said.

‘Does he seem pleased?’ asked Mrs. Mickie, demurely.

’He said he was afraid she would find it very hot coming up here from Bombay. And, of course, he is worried about a house. When a man has been living for months at the Club ’

’Of course, poor fellow! I do love that dear old Colonel Innes, though I can’t say I know him a bit. He won’t take the trouble to be nice to me, but I am perfectly certain he must be the dearest old thing inside of him. Worth any dozen of these little bow-wows that run round after rickshaws,’ said Mrs. Mickie, with candour.

‘I think he’s a ridiculous old glacier,’ Mrs. Gammidge remarked, and Mrs. Mickie looked at Madeline and said, ‘Slap her!’

‘What for?’ asked Miss Anderson, with composure. ’I dare say he is occasionally. It isn’t a bad thing to be, I should think, in Indian temperatures.’

‘I guess you got it that time, dear lady,’ said Mrs. Mickie to Mrs. Gammidge, as Madeline slipped toward the door.

’Meant to be cross, did she? How silly of her! If she gives her little heart away like that often, people will begin to make remarks.’

‘The worst of that girl is,’ Mrs. Mickie continued, ’that you never can depend upon her. For days together she’ll be just as giddy and jolly as anybody and then suddenly she’ll give you a nasty superior bit of ice down the back of your neck like that. I’ve got her coming to tea tomorrow afternoon,’ Mrs. Mickie added, with sudden gloom, ’and little Lord Billy and all that set are coming. They’ll throw buns at each other I know they will. What, in heaven’s name, made me ask her?’

’Oh, she’ll have recovered by then. You must make allowance for the shock we gave her, poor dear. Consider how you would feel if Lady Worsley suddenly appeared upon the scene, and demanded devotion from Sir Frank.’

‘She wouldn’t get it,’ Mrs. Mickie dimpled candidly. ’Frank always loses his heart and his conscience at the same time. But you don’t suppose there’s anything serious in this affair? Pure pretty platonics, I should call it.’

Mrs. Gammidge lifted her eyebrows. ’I dare say that is what they imagine it. Well, they’re never in the same room for two minutes without being aware of it, and their absorption when they get in a corner I saw her keep the Viceroy waiting, the other night after dinner, while Colonel Innes finished a sentence. And then she was annoyed at the interruption. Here’s Kitty Vesey, lookin’ such a dog! Hello, Kitty! where did you get that hat, where did you get that tile? But that wasn’t the colour of your hair last week, Kitty!’

’Don’t feel any kind of a dog’ Mrs. Vesey’s pout, though becoming, was genuine. ’I’m in a perfectly furious rage, my dears, and I’m coming home to cry, just as soon as I’ve had an ice. What do you think they won’t let me have Val for Captain Wynne’s part in ’The Outcast Pearl’ they say he’s been tried before, and he’s a stick. Did you ever hear of such brutes? They want me to act with Major Dalton, and he’s much too old for the part.’

‘Kitten,’ said Mrs. Mickie, with conviction, ’Valentine Drake on the stage would be fatal to your affection for him.’

’I don’t care, I won’t act with anybody else I’ll throw up the part. Haven’t I got to make love to the man? How am I to play up to such an unkissable-looking animal as Major Dalton? I shall certainly throw up the part.’

’Don’t do anything rash, Kitty. If you do, they’ll probably offer it to me, and I warn you I won’t give it back to you.’

’Oh, refuse it, like a dear! I am dying to put them in a hole. It’s jealousy, that’s what it is. Goodbye, Mrs. Jack, I’ve had a lovely time. Val and I have been explaining our affection to the Archdeacon, and he says it’s perfectly innocent. We’re going to get him to put it on paper to produce when Jimmy sues for a divorce, aren’t we, Val?’

‘You’re not going?’ said Mrs. Jack Owen.

’Oh, yes, I must. But I’ve enjoyed myself awfully, and so has everybody I’ve been talking to. I say, Mickie, dear about tomorrow afternoon I suppose I may bring Val?’

‘Oh, dear, yes,’ Mrs. Mickie replied. ’But you must let me hold his hand.’

‘I don’t know which of you is the most ridiculous,’ Mrs. Owen remarked; ‘I shall write to both your husbands this very night,’ but as the group shifted and left her alone with Mrs. Gammidge, she said she didn’t know whether Mrs. Vesey would be quite so chirpy three weeks hence. ’When Mrs. Innes comes out,’ she added in explanation. ’Oh, yes, Valentine Drake is quite her property. My own idea is that Kitty won’t be in it.’

Where the road past Peliti’s dips to the Mall Madeline met Horace Innes. When she appeared in her rickshaw he dismounted, and gave the reins to his syce. She saw in his eyes the look of a person who has been all day lapsing into meditation and rousing himself from it. ’You are very late,’ she said as he came up.

’Oh, I’m not going; at least, you are just coming away, aren’t you? I think it is too late. I’ll turn back with you.’

‘Do,’ she said, and looked at his capable, sensitive hand as he laid it on the side of her little carriage. Miss Anderson had not the accomplishment of palm-reading, but she took general manual impressions. She had observed Colonel Innes’s hand before, but it had never offered itself so intimately to her inspection. That, perhaps, was why the conviction seemed new to her, as she thought ’He is admirable and it is all there.’

When they got to the level Mall he kept his hold, which was a perfectly natural and proper thing for him to do, walking alongside; but she still looked at it.

‘I have heard your good news,’ she said, smiling congratulation at him.

’My good news? Oh, about my wife, of course. Yes, she ought to be here by the end of the month. I thought of writing to tell you when the telegram came, and then I didn’t. The files drove it out of my head, I fancy.’

‘Heavy day?’

‘Yes,’ he said, absently. They went along together in an intimacy of silence, and Madeline was quite aware of the effort with which she said:

‘I shall look forward to meeting Mrs. Innes.’

It was plain that his smile was perfunctory, but he put it on with creditable alacrity.

‘She will be delighted. My wife is a clever woman,’ he went on, ’very bright and attractive. She keeps people well amused.’

‘She must be a great success in India, then.’

’I think she is liked. She has a tremendous fund of humour and spirits. A fellow feels terribly dull beside her sometimes.’

Madeline cast a quick glance at him, but he was only occupied to find other matters with which he might commend his wife.

‘She is very fond of animals,’ he said, ’and she sings and plays well really extremely well.’

‘That must be charming,’ murmured Madeline, privately iterating, ’He doesn’t mean to damn her he doesn’t mean to damn her.’ ’Have you a photograph of her?’

‘Quantities of them,’ he said, with simplicity.

‘You have never shown me one. But how could you?’ she added in haste; ’a photograph is always about the size of a door nowadays. It is simply impossible to keep one’s friends and relations in a pocketbook as one used to do.’

They might have stopped there, but some demon of persistence drove Madeline on. She besought help from her imagination; she was not for the moment honest. It was an impulse an equivocal impulse born doubtless of the equivocal situation, and it ended badly.

‘She will bring something of the spring out to you,’ said Madeline ’the spring in England. How many years is it since you have seen it? There will be a breath of the cowslips about her, and in her eyes the soft wet of the English sky. Oh, you will be very glad to see her.’ The girl was well aware of her insincerity, but only dimly of her cruelty. She was drawn on by something stronger than her sense of honesty and humanity, a determination to see, to know, that swept these things away.

Innes’s hand tightened on the rickshaw, and he made at first no answer. Then he said:

‘She has been staying in town, you know.’

There was just a quiver of Madeline’s eyelid; it said nothing of the natural rapacity behind. This man’s testimony was coming out in throes, and yet it must be said again she probed.

‘Then she will put you in touch again,’ she cried; ’you will remember when you see her all the vigour of great issues and the fascination of great personalities. For a little while, anyway, after she comes, you will be in a world far away from here where people talk and think and live.’

He looked at her in wonder, not understanding, as indeed how could he?

‘Why,’ he said, ‘you speak of what you have done’; and before the truth of this she cast down her eyes and turned a hot, deep red, and had nothing to say.

‘No,’ he said, ‘my wife is not like that.’

He walked along in absorption, from which he roused himself with resentment in his voice.

’I can not leave such a fabric of illusion in your mind. It irritates me that it should be there about anybody belonging to me. My wife is not in the least what you imagine her. She has her virtues, but she is like the rest. I can not hope that you will take to her, and she won’t like you either we never care about the same people. And we shall see nothing of you nothing. I can hardly believe that I am saying this of my own wife, but I wish that she had stayed in England.’

‘Mrs. Mickie!’ cried Madeline to a passing rickshaw, ’what are you rushing on like that for? Just go quietly and peaceably along with us, please, and tell us what Mrs. Vesey decided to do about her part in ’The Outcast Pearl’. I’m dining out tonight I must know.’ And Mrs. Mickie was kind enough to accompany them all the rest of the way.

Miss Anderson dined out, and preferred to suppose that she had no time to think until she was on her way home along the empty road round Jakko at eleven o’clock that night. Then it pleased her to get out of her rickshaw and walk. There was an opulent moon, the vast hills curving down to the plains were all grey and silvery, and the deodars overhead fretted the road with dramatic shadows. About her hung the great stillness in a mighty loneliness in which little Simla is set, and it freed her from what had happened, so that she could look at it and cry out. She actually did speak, pausing in the little pavilion on the road where the nursemaids gather in the daytime, but very low, so that her words fell round her even in that silence, and hardly a deodar was aware. ‘I will not go now,’ she said. ’I will stay and realize that he is another woman’s husband. That should cure me if anything will to see him surrounded by the commonplaces of married life, that kind of married life. I will stay till she comes and a fortnight after. Besides, I want to see her I want to see how far she comes short.’ She was silent for a moment, and the moonlight played upon her smile of quiet triumph. ‘He cares too,’ she said; ’he cares too, but he doesn’t know it, and I promise you one thing, Madeline Anderson, you won’t help him to find out. And in five weeks I will go away and leave my love where I found it on a mountaintop in the middle of Asia!’

Chapter 3.IV.

Madeline did her best to make certain changes delicately, imperceptibly, so that Innes would not, above all things, be perplexed into seeking for their reason. The walks and rides came to a vague conclusion, and Miss Anderson no longer kept the Viceroy or anybody else waiting, while Innes finished what he had to say to her in public, since his opportunities for talking to her seemed to become gradually more and more like everybody else’s. So long as she had been mistress of herself she was indifferent to the very tolerant and good-natured gossip of the hill capital; but as soon as she found her citadel undermined, the lightest kind of comment became a contingency unbearable. In arranging to make it impossible, she was really over-considerate and over-careful. Her soldier never thought of analyzing his bad luck or searching for motive in it. To him the combinations of circumstances that seemed always to deprive him of former pleasures were simply among the things that might happen. Grieving, she left him under that impression for the sake of its expediency, and tried to make it by being more than ever agreeable on the occasions when he came and demanded a cup of tea, and would not be denied. After all, she consoled herself, no situation was improved by being turned too suddenly upside down.

She did not wholly withdraw his privilege of taking counsel with her, and he continued to go away freshened and calmed, leaving her to toss little sad reflections into the fire, and tremulously wonder whether the jewel of her love had flashed ever so little behind the eyes. They both saw it a conspicuous thing that as those three weeks went on, neither he nor she alluded even remotely to Mrs. Innes, but the fact remained, and they allowed it to remain.

Nevertheless, Madeline knew precisely when that lady was expected, and as she sauntered in the bazaar one morning, and heard Innes’s steps and voice behind her, her mind became one acute surmise as to whether he could possibly postpone the announcement any longer. But he immediately made it plain that this was his business in stopping to speak to her. ‘Good morning,’ he said, and then, ‘My wife comes tomorrow.’ He had not told her a bit of personal news, he had made her an official communication, as briefly as it could be done, and he would have raised his hat and gone on without more words if Madeline had not thwarted him. ‘What a stupidity for him to be haunted by afterward!’ was the essence of the thought that visited her; and she put out a detaining hand.

’Really! By the Bombay mail, I suppose no, an hour or so later; private tongas are always as much as that behind the mail.’

’About eleven, I fancy. You you are not inclined for a canter round Summer Hill before breakfast?’

’I am terrified of Summer Hill. The Turk always misbehaves there. Yesterday he got one leg well over the khud I was thankful he had four. Tell me, are you ready for Mrs. Innes everything in the house? Is there anything I can do?

’Oh, thanks very much! I don’t think so. The house isn’t ready, as a matter of fact, but two or three people have offered to put us up for a day or so until it is. I’ve left it open till my wife comes, as I dare say she has already arranged to go to somebody. What are you buying? Country tobacco, upon my word! For your men? That’s subversive of all discipline!’

The lines on his face relaxed; he looked at her with fond recognition of another delightful thing in her.

‘You give sugar-cane to your horses,’ she declared; ’why shouldn’t I give tobacco to mine? Goodbye; I hope Mrs. Innes will like “Two Gables”. There are roses waiting for her in the garden, at all events.’

‘Are there?’ he said. ‘I didn’t notice. Goodbye, then.’

He went on to his office thinking of the roses, and that they were in his garden, and that Madeline had seen them there. He thought that if they were good roses in fact, any kind of roses they should be taken care of, and he asked a Deputy Assistant Inspector-General of Ordnance whether he knew of a gardener that was worth anything.

‘Most of them are mere coolies,’ said Colonel Innes, ’and I’ve got some roses in this little place I’ve taken that I want to look after.’

Next day Madeline took Brookes, and ‘The Amazing Marriage’, and a lunch-basket, and went out to Mashobra, where the deodars shadow hardly any scandal at all, and the Snows come, with perceptible confidence, a little nearer.

‘They almost step,’ she said to Brookes, looking at them, ’out of the realm of the imagination.’

Brookes said that they did indeed, and hoped that she hadn’t by any chance forgotten the mustard.

’The wind is keen off the glaciers over there anybody would think of a condiment,’ Miss Anderson remarked in deprecation, and to this Brookes made no response. It was a liberty she often felt compelled to take.

The Snows appealed to Madeline even more than did Carintha, Countess of Fleetwood, to whose fortunes she gave long pauses while she looked across their summits at renunciation, and fancied her spirit made strong and equal to its task. She was glad of their sanctuary; she did not know where she should find such another. Perhaps the spectacle was more than ever sublime in its alternative to the one she had come away to postpone the sight of; at all events it drove the reunion of the Inneses from her mind several times for five minutes together, during which she thought of Horace by himself, and went over, by way of preparation for her departure, all that had come and gone between them. There had been luminous moments, especially as they irradiated him, and she dwelt on these. There was no reason why she should not preserve in London or in New York a careful memory of them.

So the lights were twinkling all up and down and round about Simla when she cantered back to it and it was late when she started for the Worsleys, where she was dining. One little lighted house looked much like another perched on the mountainside, and the wooden board painted ‘Branksome Hall, Maj.-Gen. T.P. Worsley, R.E.,’ nailed to the most conspicuous tree from the main road, was invisible in the darkness. Madeline arrived in consequence at the wrong dinner-party, and was acclaimed and redirected with much gaiety, which gave her a further agreeable impression of the insouciance of Simla, but made her later still at the Worsleys. So that half the people were already seated when she at last appeared, and her hostess had just time to cry, ’My dear, we thought the langurs must have eaten you! Captain Gordon, you are not abandoned after all. You know Miss Anderson?’ when she found herself before her soup.

Captain Gordon heard her account of herself with complacence, and declared, wiping his moustache, that a similar experience had befallen him only a fortnight before.

’Did you ever hear the story of that absent-minded chap, Sir James Jackson, who went to the right dinner-party by mistake?’ he asked, ’and apologized like mad, by Jove! and insisted he couldn’t stay. The people nearly had to tie him down in his ’ Captain Gordon stopped, arrested by his companion’s sudden and complete inattention.

‘I see a lady,’ interrupted Madeline, with odd distinctness, ’curiously like somebody I have known before.’ Her eyes convinced themselves, and then refused to be convinced of the inconceivable fact that they were resting on Violet Prendergast. It was at first too amazing, too amazing only. Then an old forgotten feeling rose in her bosom; the hand on the stem of her wine-glass grew tense. The sensation fell away; she remembered her emancipation, the years arose and reassured her during which Violet Prendergast, living or dead, had been to her of absolutely no importance. Yet there was a little aroused tremour in her voice as she went on, ’She is on the General’s right he must have taken her in. Can you see from where you are sitting?’

’These narrow oval tables are a nuisance that way, aren’t they? You don’t know who you’re dining with till the end of the function. Oh! I see that’s Mrs. Innes, just out, and fresh as paint, isn’t she? The Colonel’ Captain Gordon craned his head again ’is sitting fourth from me on this side.’

‘Mrs. Innes! Really!’ said Madeline. ’Then then of course I must be mistaken.’

She removed her eyes almost stealthily from the other woman’s face and fixed them on the pattern of the table-cloth. Her brain guided her clearly through the tumult of her perception, and no emotion could be observed in the smiling attention which she gave to Captain Gordon’s account of the afternoon’s tandem racing; but there was a furious beating in her breast, and she thought she could never draw a breath long enough to control it. It helped her that there was food to swallow, wine to drink, and Captain Gordon to listen to; and under cover of these things she gradually, consciously, prepared herself for the shock of encounter which should be conclusive. Presently she leaned a little forward and let her glance, in which no outsider could see the steady recognition, rest upon the lady on the General’s right, until that person’s agreeable blue eyes wandered down the table and met it. Perhaps Madeline’s own eyelids fluttered a little as she saw the sudden stricture in the face that received her message, and the grimace with which it uttered, pallid with apprehension, its response to a pleasantry of General Worsley’s. She was not consummate in her self-control, but she was able at all events to send the glance travelling prettily on with a casual smile for an intervening friend, and bring it back to her dinner-roll without mischief. It did not adventure again; she knew, and she set herself to hold her knowledge, to look at it and understand it, while the mechanical part of her made up its mind about the entrees, and sympathized with Captain Gordon on his hard luck in having three ponies laid up at once. She did not look again, although she felt the watching of the other woman, and was quite aware of the moment at which Mrs. Innes allowed herself the reprieve of believing that at the Worsley’s dinner-party at least there would be no scandal. The belief had its reflex action, doing something to calm her. How could there be scandal she asked herself, and dismissed with relief the denunciations which crowded vague but insistent in her brain. Even then she had not grasped the salient points of the situation; she was too much occupied with its irony as it affected her personally; her impressions circled steadily round the word ‘twice’ and the unimaginable coincidence. Her resentment filled her, and her indignation was like a clear flame behind her smiling face. Robbed twice, once in New York and oh! preposterous the second time in Simla! Robbed of the same things by the same hand! She perceived in the shock of it only a monstrous fatality, a ludicrously wicked chance. This may have been due to the necessity of listening to Captain Gordon.

At all events it was only as she passed Colonel Innes on her way to the drawing-room and saw ahead of her the very modish receding back of Mrs. Innes that she realized other things crime and freedom.

It was the reversion of power; it brought her a great exultation. She sat down under it in a corner, hoping to be left alone, with a white face and shining eyes. Power and opportunity and purpose righteous purpose!

The circumstances had come to her in a flash; she brought them up again steadily and scrutinized them. The case was absolutely clear. Frank Prendergast had been dead just seven months. Colonel Innes imagined himself married four years. Violet Prendergast was a bigamist, and Horace Innes had no wife.

That was the marvellous transcendent fact; that was what lifted her and carried her on great pulsing waves that rolled beyond the walls of the little fripperied drawing-room and its collection of low-necked women, out into her life, which had not these boundaries. She lived again in a possible world. There was no stone wall between herself and joy.

The old Mussulman butler who offered her coffee looked at her with aroused curiosity here was certainly a memsahib under the favour of God and as she stirred it, the shadow that Violet Prendergast had thrown upon her life faded out of her mind in the light that was there. Then she looked up and met that lady’s vivid blue eyes. Mrs. Innes’s colour had not returned, but there was a recklessness in the lines of her mouth. In the way she held her chin, expressing that she had been reflecting on old scores, and anticipated the worst. Meeting this vigilance Miss Anderson experienced a slight recoil. Her happiness, she realized, had been brought to her in the hands of ugly circumstance.

‘And so melodramatic,’ she told herself. ’It is really almost vulgar. In a story I should have no patience with it.’ But she went on stirring her coffee with a little uncontrollable smile.

A moment later she had to contemplate the circumstance that her hostess was addressing her. Mrs. Innes wished to be introduced. Mrs. Innes, incarnate, conscious sensation, was smiling at her, saying that she must know so great a friend of her husband’s. He made so few friends, and she was so grateful to anybody who was good to him. Eyes and voice tolerably in rein, aware of the situation at every point, she had a meretricious daring; and it occurred to Madeline, looking at her, that she was after all a fairly competent second-class adventuress. She would not refuse the cue. It would make so little difference.

’On the contrary, I am tremendously indebted to Colonel Innes. He has been so very kind about ponies and jhampanies and things. Simla is full of pitfalls for a stranger, don’t you think?’ And Miss Anderson, unclosing her fan, turned her reposeful head a little in the direction of three married schoolgirls voluble on her left.

’Not when you get to know the language. You must learn the language; it’s indispensable. But of course it depends on how long you mean to stay.’

‘I think I will learn the language,’ said Madeline.

‘But General Worsley told me you were leaving Simla in a fortnight.’

’Oh no. My plans are very indefinite; but I shall stay much longer than that.’

’It is Miss Anderson, isn’t it? Miss Madeline Anderson, of New York no, Brooklyn?’

Madeline looked at her. ‘Did not the General say so?’ she asked.

‘Yes, he did. But one looks to make quite sure.’

‘I can understand that.’

Mrs. Innes leaned forward with one elbow on her knee.

It was not a graceful attitude, but it gave the casual air to the conversation which was desirable.

‘What are you going to do?’ she said.

‘My plans are as indefinite as possible, really,’ Madeline returned. ’I may spend the cold weather in Calcutta, or go into camp with the Dovedells I should like that.’

‘Mrs. Innes,’ cried the nearest schoolgirl, ’we are coming tomorrow to see all the lovely things in your boxes, may we?’

’Do, duckies. But mind, no copying of them by durzies in the veranda. They’re all Paris things Coulter’s and you know he doesn’t copy well, does he? Oh, dear! here are the men they always come too soon, don’t they? So glad to have had even a little chat, Miss Anderson. I’ll come and see you tomorrow. You know newcomers in India always make the first calls. I shall find you at home, sha’n’t I?’

‘By all means,’ Madeline said.

Mrs. Innes crossed the room, crying out that the heat was perfectly absurd for Simla, it must be cooler outside; and as Captain Valentine Drake followed her into the semi-darkness of the veranda, the three married schoolgirls looked at each other and smiled.

‘Don’t be naughty,’ said Captain Gordon, leaning over the sofa from behind. ’They’re very dear friends, and they’ve been separated for two years.’

Madeline heard this as plainly as they did. She noted disdainfully how it all fell in.

‘How absent you are tonight!’ Horace Innes exclaimed, when Miss Anderson had asked him a trivial question for the third time.

‘Hush!’ she said. ‘Mrs. Scallepa is going to sing;’ and as Mrs. Scallepa sang she let her eyes play over him with a light in them so tender, that once catching it the felt a sudden answering throb, and looked again; but after that her eyes were on the floor.

‘We are staying here,’ he said a quarter of an hour later, as he saw her into her rickshaw; ’and I think I must see you to your quarters. It’s very dark, and there is an ugly little slip half-way between this and the Mall.

He ran upstairs to get his coat and stick, and a white face like an apparition suddenly hung itself on the edge of Madeline’s rickshaw-hood.

‘Don’t tell him tonight,’ it said, hoarsely.

‘Are you ready, Colonel Innes? Then good night, everybody,’ cried Madeline.

She was not at all sure that she would not tell Horace Innes ‘tonight’.

Chapter 3.V.

‘My wife,’ said Colonel Innes, ‘is looking extremely well.’

‘She seems so, indeed,’ Madeline replied.

’She is delighted with “Two Gables”. Likes it better, she says, than any other house we could have got.’

‘What a good thing!’

’It was a record trip for the Caledonia, thirteen days from Brindisi to Bombay. Was she telling you about the voyage?’

‘No,’ said Madeline impatiently, ’she didn’t mention it. How shall I tell the men to put down the hood, please? A rickshaw is detestable with the hood up stifling! Thanks. I beg your pardon. The Caledonia made a good run?’

’Thirteen days. Wonderful weather, of course, which was luck for Violet. She is an atrocious sailor.’

Madeline fancied she heard repose and reassurance in his voice. Her thought cried, ‘It is not so bad as he expected!’ We can not be surprised that she failed to see in herself the alleviation of that first evening.

‘She has brought quantities of things for the house with her,’ Innes went on, ‘as well as three dachshund puppies,’ and he laughed. ’Wouldn’t you like one? What can we do with three and the terrier, and Brutus?’

‘Oh, thank you, no.’

How could he laugh? How could he speak pleasantly of these intimate details of his bondage? How could he conceive that she would accept

’Already she has arranged four dinner-parties! It will be a relief not to have to think of that sort of thing to be able to leave it to her.’

’Mrs. Innes must have great energy. To drive all the way up from Kalka by noon and appear at a dinner-party at night wonderful!’

‘Oh, great energy,’ Horace said.

’She will take you everywhere to all the functions. She will insist on your duty to society.’

Madeline felt that she must get him somehow back into his slough of despond. His freedom paralyzed her. And he returned with a pathetic change of tone.

’I suppose there is no alternative. Violet is very good about being willing to go alone, or with somebody else; but I never think it quite fair on one’s wife to impose on her the necessity of going about with other men.’

‘Mrs. Worsley introduced us after dinner,’ said Madeline.

She kept disparagement out of her mind, but he could not help perceiving aloofness.

‘Yes?’

The monosyllable told her sensitive ear that while he admitted her consideration in going on with the subject, he was willing to recognize that there was no more to say, and have done with it. She gathered up her scruples and répugnances in a firm grasp. She would not let him throw his own shadow, as an effectual obstacle, between himself and liberty.

‘I am going to ask you something,’ she said; it might come naturally enough from another man with whom your friendship was as candid as it is with me; but there is an awkwardness in it from a woman. You must believe I have a good reason. Will you tell me about your first meeting with Mrs. Innes, when when you became engaged?’

She knew she was daring a good deal; but when a man’s prison is to be brought down about his ears, one might as well begin, she thought, at the foundation.

For a moment Innes did not speak, and then his words came slowly.

I find it difficult,’ he said, ’to answer you. How can it matter it is impossible. I suppose you have heard some story, and it is like you to want to be in a position to negative it. Ignore it instead. She has very successfully championed herself. Believe nothing to her disadvantage that may be said about that that time. I was pleased to marry her, and she was pleased to marry me. But for God’s sake don’t let us talk about it!’

As he spoke Madeline saw the vivid clearness of the situation grow blurred and confused. It was as if her point of view had suddenly changed and her eyes failed her. Her eager impulse had beat less and less strongly from the Worsley’s door; now it seemed to shrink away in fetters. Her eyes filled with vaguely resentful tears, which sprang, if she could have traced them, from the fact that the man she loved was loyal to his own mistake, and the formless premonition that he might continue to be. She contorted her lip to keep her emotion back, and deliberately turned away from a matter in which she was not mistress, and which contained ugly possibilities of buffeting. She would wait a little, and though consideration for Violet Prendergast had nothing to do with it, she would not tell him tonight.

‘I am sorry,’ she said; and, after a moment, ’Did I tell you that I have changed my plans?’

‘You are not going so soon?’ she took all the comfort there was in his eagerness.

’I am not going at all for the present. I have abandoned my intentions and my dates. I mean to drift for a little while. I have been too too conscientious.’

‘Are you quite serious do you mean it?’

‘Indeed I do.’

’And in less than a fortnight you will not go out of one’s life. You will stay on you summer day! It’s hard to believe in luck like that. I sent a poor devil of a sepoy a reprieve last week one knows now how he must have felt about it.’

‘Does it make all that difference?’ Madeline asked, softly.

‘It makes a difference,’ he answered, controlling his words, ’that I am glad you can not conceive, since that would mean that your life has been as barren as mine.’ He seemed to refrain from saying more, and then he added, ’You must be careful when you plant your friendship that you mean it to stay, and blossom. It will not come easily up by the roots, and it will leave an ugly hole.’

He was helping her out of her rickshaw, and as they followed the servant who carried her wraps the few yards to the door, she left her hand lightly on his arm. It was the seal, he thought, of her unwritten bond that there should be no uprooting of the single flower he cherished; and he went back almost buoyantly because of it to the woman who had been sitting in the sackcloth and ashes of misfortune, turning over the expedients for which his step might make occasion.

By the time the monkeys began to scramble about the roof in the early creeping of the dawn among the deodars, Madeline had groped her way to a tolerably clear conception of what might happen. The impeding circumstance everywhere, it must be acknowledged, was Frederick Prendergast’s coffin. The case, had convict N been still alive and working out his debt to society, would have been transcendentally simple, she told herself. Even a convict has a right a prospective right to his wife, and no honest man should be compelled to retain a criminal’s property. This was an odd reflection, perhaps, to be made by Madeline Anderson, but the situation as a whole might be described as curious. And there was no doubt about the coffin.

Chapter 3.VI.

The veranda of which Miss Anderson’s little sitting-room claimed its section hung over the road, and it seemed to her that she heard the sound of Mrs. Innes’s arrival about ten minutes after breakfast.

On the contrary, she had spent two whole hours contemplating, with very fixed attention, first the domestic circumstances of Colonel Horace Innes and their possible development, and then, with a pang of profoundest acknowledgment, the moral qualities which he would bring to bear upon them. She was further from knowing what course she personally intended to pursue than ever, when she heard the wheels roll up underneath; and she had worked herself into a state of sufficient detachment from the whole problem to reflect upon the absurdity of a bigamist rattling forth to discuss her probable ruin in the fanciful gaiety of a rickshaw. The circumstances had its value though; it lightened all responsibility for the lady concerned. As Madeline heard her jump out and give pronounced orders for the securing of an accompanying dachshund, it did not seem to matter so particularly what became of Violet Prendergast.

Mrs. Innes’s footsteps came briskly along the veranda. Madeline noted that there was no lagging. ‘Number seven,’ she said aloud; as she passed other doors, ‘Number eight number nine! Ah! there you are.’ The door was open. ’I wouldn’t let them bring up my card for fear of some mistake. How do you do? Now please don’t get up you look so comfortable with your book. What is it? Oh, yes, of course, that. People were talking about it a good deal when I left London, but I haven’t read it. Is it good?’

‘I like it,’ said Madeline. She half rose as Mrs. Innes entered; but as the lady did not seem to miss the ceremony of greeting, she was glad to sink back in her chair.

’And how do you like Simla? Charming in many ways, isn’t it? A little too flippant, I always say rather too much champagne and silliness. But awfully bracing.’

‘The Snows are magnificent,’ Madeline said, ’when you can see them. And there’s a lot of good work done here.’

’Aren’t they divine? I did nothing, absolutely nothing, my first season but paint them. And the shops they’re not bad, are they, for the size of the place? Though today, upon my soul, there doesn’t seem to be a yard of white spotted veiling among them.’

‘That is annoying,’ said Madeline, ‘if you want spotted veiling.’

’Isn’t it? Well’ Mrs. Innes take a deep breath ’you didn’t tell him last night?’

‘N no,’ said Madeline, with deliberation.

’I was grateful. I knew I could rely upon you not to. It would have been too cruel when we have only just been reunited dear Horace would have had to sleep in the ’

‘Pray ’

‘Well, Horace is the soul of honour. Is your ayah in there?’ Mrs. Innes nodded towards the bedroom door. ’You can not imagine what long ears she has.’

‘I have no ayah. There is only Brookes;’ and as that excellent woman passed through the room with a towel over her arm, Madeline said, ’You can go now, Brookes, and see about that alpaca. Take the rickshaw; it looks very threatening.’

’Maid! You are a swell! There are only four genuine maids in Simla that I know of the rest are really nurse-girls. What a comfort she must be! The luxury of all others that I long for; but alas! army pay, you know. I did once bring a dear thing out with me from Nice you should have seen Horace’s face.’

‘I couldn’t very well go about quite alone; it would be uncomfortable.’

‘Except that you Americans are so perfectly independent.’

’On the contrary. If I could order about a servant the way an Englishwoman does ’

’Say you are not going to tell him! I’ve got such a lot of other calls to make,’ exclaimed Mrs. Innes. ’Dear Lady Bloomfield won’t understand it if I don’t call today, especially after the baby. What people in that position want with more babies I can not comprehend. Of course you haven’t noticed it, but a baby is such a shock to Simla.’

‘Don’t let me keep you,’ Madeline said, rising.

’But you haven’t promised. Do promise, Miss Anderson. You gain nothing by telling him, except your revenge; and I should think by this time you would have forgiven me for taking Frederick away from you. He didn’t turn out so well! You can’t still bear me malice over that convict in Sing Sing.’

‘For his sake, poor fellow, I might.’

’Coming along I said to myself, “She can score off me badly, but surely she doesn’t want to so much as all that.” Besides, I really only took your leavings, you know. You threw poor Fred Prendergast over.’

‘I am not prepared to discuss that,’ Madeline said, at no pains to smooth the curve out of her lip.

’Then I thought, “Perhaps you never can tell with people she will think it her duty to make a fuss."’

‘That is a possible point of view.’

’I know. You think I’m an imposter on society and I ought to be exposed, and I suppose you could shut every door in Simla against me if you liked. But you are a friend of my husband’s, Miss Anderson. You would not turn his whole married life into a scandal and ruin his career?’

‘Ruin his career?’

’Of course. Government is awfully particular. It mayn’t be his fault in the least, but no man is likely to get any big position with a cloud over his domestic affairs. Horace would resign, naturally.’

‘Or take long leave,’ Mrs. Innes added to herself, but she did not give Madeline this alternative. A line or two of nervous irritation marked themselves about her eyes, and her colour had faded. Her hat was less becoming than it had been, and she had pulled a button off her glove.

‘Besides,’ she went on quickly, ’it isn’t as if you could do any good, you know. The harm was done once for all when I let him think he’d married me. I thought then well, I had to take it or leave it and every week I expected to hear of Frederick’s death. Then I meant to tell Horace myself, and have the ceremony over again. He couldn’t refuse. And all these years it’s been like living on a volcano, in the fear of meeting New York people. Out here there never are any, but in England I dye my hair, and alter my complexion.’

‘Why did you change your mind,’ Madeline asked, ’about telling Colonel Innes?’

’I haven’t! Why should I change my mind? For my own protection, I mean to get things put straight instantly when the time comes.’

‘When the time comes,’ Madeline repeated; and her eyes, as she fixed them on Mrs. Innes, were suddenly so lightened with a new idea that she dropped the lids over them as she waited for the answer.

‘When poor Frederick does pass away,’ Mrs. Innes said, with an air of observing the proprieties. ’When they put him in prison it was a matter of months, the doctors said. That was one reason why I went abroad. I couldn’t bear to stay there and see him dying by inches, poor fellow.’

‘Couldn’t you?’

’Oh, I couldn’t. And the idea of the hard labour made me sick. But it seems to have improved his health, and now there is no telling! I sometimes believe he will live out his sentence. Should you think that possible in the case of a man with half a lung?’

‘I have no knowledge of pulmonary disease,’ Madeline said. She forced the words from her lips and carefully looked away, taking this second key to the situation mechanically, and for a moment groping with it.

‘What arrangement did you make to be informed about about him?’ she asked, and instantly regretted having gone so perilously near provoking a direct question.

’I subscribe to the “New York World”. I used to see lots of things in it about the shock the news of my death gave him ’

A flash of hysterical amusement shot into Mrs. Innes’s eyes, and she questioned Madeline’s face to see whether it responded to her humour. Then she put her own features straight behind her handkerchief and went on.

’And about his failing health, and then about his being so much better. But nothing now for ages.’

‘Did the “World” tell you,’ asked Miss Anderson, with sudden interest, ’that Mr. Prendergast came into a considerable fortune before about two years ago?’

Mrs. Innes’s face turned suddenly blank. ‘How much?’ she exclaimed.

’About five hundred thousand dollars, I believe. Left him by a cousin. Then you didn’t know?’

‘That must have been Gordon Prendergast the engineer!’ Mrs. Innes said, with excitement. ’Fancy that! Leaving money to a relation in Sing Sing! Hadn’t altered his will, I suppose. Who could possibly,’ and her face fell visibly, ‘have foreseen such a thing?’

‘No one, I think,’ said Madeline, through a little edged smile. ’On that point you will hardly be criticized.’

Mrs. Innes, with clasped hands, was sunk in thought. She raised her eyes with a conviction in them which she evidently felt to be pathetic.

‘After all,’ she said, ’there is something in what the padres say about our reaping the reward of our misdeeds in this world some of us, anyway. If I had stayed in New York ’

‘Yes?’ said Madeline. ‘I shall wake up presently,’ she reflected, ’and find that I have been dreaming melodrama.’ But that was a fantastic underscoring of her experience. She knew very well she was making it.

Mrs. Innes, again wrapped in astonished contemplation, did not reply. Then she jumped to her feet with a gesture that cast fortunes back into the lap of fate.

‘One thing is certain,’ she said; ‘I can’t do anything now, can I?’

Madeline laid hold of silence and made armour with it. At all events, she must have time to think.

‘I decline to advise you,’ she said, and she spoke with a barely perceptive movement of her lips only. The rest of her face was stone.

’How unkind and unforgiving you are! Must people would think the loss of a hundred thousand pounds about punishment enough for what I have done. You don’t seem to see it. But on top of that you won’t refuse to promise not to tell Horace?’

‘I will not bind myself in any way whatever.’

’Not even when you know that the moment I hear of the death I intend to to ’

‘Make an honest man of him? Not even when I know that.’

‘Do you want me to go down on my knees to you?’

Madeline glanced at the flowered fabric involved and said, ’I wouldn’t, I think.’

’And this is to hang over me the whole season? I shall enjoy nothing absolutely nothing.’ The blue eyes were suddenly eclipsed by angry tears, which the advent of a servant with cards checked as suddenly.

‘Goodbye, then, dear,’ cried Mrs. Innes, as if in response to the advancing rustle of skirts in the veranda. ’So glad to have found you at home. Dear me, has Trilby made her way up and I gave such particular orders! Oh, you naughty dog!’

Chapter 3.VII.

From the complication that surged round Miss Anderson’s waking hours one point emerged, and gave her a perch for congratulation. That was the determination she had shown in refusing to let Frederick Prendergast leave her his money, or any part of it.

It has been said that he had outlived her tenderness, if not her care, and this fact, which she never found it necessary to communicate to poor Frederick himself, naturally made his desire in the matter sharply distasteful. She was even unaware of the disposition he had made of his ironical fortune, a reflection which brought her thankfulness that there was something she did not know. ‘If I had let him do it,’ she thought, ’I should have felt compelled to tell her everything, instantly. And think of discussing it with her!’ This was quite a fortnight later, and Mrs. Innes still occupied her remarkable position only in her own mind and Madeline’s, still knowing herself the wife of 1596 and of 1596 only, and still unaware that 1596 was in his grave. Simla had gone on with its dances and dinners and gymkhanas quite as if no crucial experience were hanging over the heads of three of the people one met ‘everywhere,’ and the three people continued to be met everywhere, although only one of them was unconscious. The women tried to avoid each other without accenting it, exchanging light words only as occasion demanded, but they were not clever enough for Mrs. Gammidge and Mrs. Mickie, who went about saying that Mrs. Innes’s treatment of Madeline Anderson was as ridiculous as it was inexplicable. ’Did you ever know her to be jealous of anybody before?’ demanded Mrs. Mickie, to which Mrs. Gammidge responded, with her customary humour, that the Colonel had never, in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, been known to give her occasion.

‘Well,’ declared Mrs. Mickie, ’if friendships UNSENTIMENTAL friendships between men and women are not understood in Simla, I’d like to be told what is understood.’

Between them they gave Madeline a noble support, for which although she did not particularly require it, and they did not venture to offer it in so many words she was grateful. A breath of public criticism from any point of view would have blown over the toppling structure she was defending against her conscience. The siege was severe and obstinate, with an undermining conviction ever at work that in the end she would yield; in the end she would go away, at least as far as Bombay or Calcutta, and from there send to Mrs. Innes the news of her liberation. It would not be necessary, after all, or even excusable, to tell Horace. His wife would do that quickly enough at least, she had said she would. If she didn’t well, if she didn’t, nothing would be possible but another letter, giving him the simple facts, she, Madeline, carefully out of the way of his path of duty at all events, at Calcutta or Bombay. But there was no danger that Mrs. Innes would lose the advantage of confession, of throwing herself on his generosity and at this point Madeline usually felt her defenses against her better nature considerably strengthened, and the date of her sacrifice grow vague again.

Meanwhile, she was astonished to observe that, in spite of her threat to the contrary, Mrs. Innes appeared to be enjoying herself particularly well. Madeline had frequent occasion for private comment on the advantages of a temperament that could find satisfaction in dancing through whole programmes at the very door, so to speak, of the criminal courts; and it can not be denied that this capacity of Mrs. Innes’s went far to increase the vacillation with which Miss Anderson considered her duty towards that lady. If she had shown traces of a single hour of genuine suffering, there would have been an end to Madeline’s hesitation. But beyond an occasional watchful glance at conversations in which she might be figuring dramatically, and upon which she instantly turned her back as soon as she was perceived, Mrs. Innes gave no sign even of preoccupation. If she had bad half-hours, they occurred between the teas and tennises, the picnics, riding-parties, luncheons, and other entertainments, at which you could always count upon meeting her; and in that case they must have been short. She looked extremely well, and her admirable frocks gave an accent even to ‘Birthday’ functions at Viceregal Lodge, which were quite hopelessly general. If any one could have compelled a revelation of her mind, I think it would have transpired that her anxieties about Capt. Valentine Drake and Mrs. Vesey gave her no leisure for lesser ones. These for a few days had been keen and indignant Captain Drake had so far forgotten himself as to ride with Mrs. Vesey twice since Mrs. Innes’s arrival and any display of poverty of spirit was naturally impossible under the circumstances. The moment was a critical one; Captain Drake seemed inclined to place her in the category of old, unexacting friends ladies who looked on and smiled, content to give him tea on rainy days, and call him by his Christian name, with perhaps the privilege of a tapping finger on his shoulder, and an occasional order about a rickshaw. Mrs. Violet was not an introspective person, or she might have discovered here that the most stable part of her self-respect was her exigence with Captain Drake.

She found out quickly enough, however, that she did not mean to discard it. She threw herself, therefore her fine shoulders and arms, her pretty clothes, her hilarity, her complexion, her eyelashes, and all that appertained to her into the critical task of making other men believe, at Captain Drake’s expense, that they were quite as fond of her as he was. Mrs. Vesey took opposite measures, and the Club laid bets on the result.

The Club was not prepossessed by Captain Drake. He said too little and he implied too much. He had magnificent shoulders, which he bent a great deal over secluded sofas, and a very languid interest in matters over which ordinary men were enthusiastic. He seemed to believe that if he smiled all the way across his face, he would damage a conventionality. His clothes were unexceptionable, and he always did the right thing, though bored by the necessity. He was good-looking in an ugly way, which gave him an air of restrained capacity for melodrama, and made women think him interesting. Somebody with a knack of disparagement said that he was too much expressed. It rather added to his unpopularity that he was a man whom women usually took with preposterous seriousness all but Kitty Vesey, who charmed and held him by her outrageous liberties. When Mrs. Vesey chaffed him, he felt picturesque. He was also aware of inspiring entertainment for the lookers-on, with the feeling at such times that he, too, was an amused spectator. This was, of course, their public attitude. In private there was sentiment, and they talked about the tyranny of society, or delivered themselves of ideas suggested by works of fiction which everybody simply had to read.

For a week Mrs. Innes looked on, apparently indifferent, rather apparently not observing; and an Assistant Secretary in the Home Department began to fancy that his patience in teaching the three dachshund puppies tricks was really appreciated. He was an on-coming Assistant Secretary, with other conspicuous parts, and hitherto his time had been too valuable to spend upon ladies’ dachshunds. Mrs. Innes had selected him well. There came an evening when, at a dance at the Lieutenant-Governor’s, Mrs. Innes was so absorbed in what the Assistant Secretary was saying to her, as she passed on his arm, that she did not see Captain Drake in the corridor at all, although he had carefully broken an engagement to walk with Kitty Vesey that very afternoon, as the beginning of gradual and painless reform in her direction. His unrewarded virtue rose up and surprised him with the distinctness of its resentment; and while his expression was successfully amused, his shoulders and the back of his neck, as well as the hand on his moustache, spoke of discipline which promised to be efficient. Reflection assured him that discipline was after all deserved, and a quarter of an hour later found him wagging his tail, so to speak, over Mrs. Innes’s programme in a corner pleasantly isolated. The other chair was occupied by the Assistant Secretary. Captain Drake represented an interruption, and was obliged to take a step towards the nearest lamp to read the card. Three dances were rather ostentatiously left, and Drake initialled them all. He brought back the card with a bow, which spoke of dignity under bitter usage, together with the inflexible intention of courteous self-control, and turned away.

’Oh, if you please, Captain Drake let me see what you’ve done. All those? But ’

‘Isn’t it after eleven, Mrs. Innes?’ asked the Assistant Secretary, with a timid smile. He was enjoying himself, but he had a respect for vested interests, and those of Captain Drake were so well known that he felt a little like a buccaneer.

‘Dear me, so it is!’ Mrs. Innes glanced at one of her bracelets. ’Then, Captain Drake, I’m sorry’ she carefully crossed out the three ’V.D.’s’ ’I promised all the dances I had left after ten to Mr. Holmcroft. Most of the others I gave away at the gymkhana really. Why weren’t you there? That Persian tutor again! I’m afraid you are working too hard. And what did the Rani do, Mr. Holmcroft? It’s like the Arabian Nights, only with real jewels ’

’Oh, I say, Holmcroft, this is too much luck, you know. Regular sweepstakes, by Jove!’ And Captain Drake lingered on the fringe of the situation.

‘Perhaps I have been greedy,’ said the Assistant Secretary, deprecatingly. ‘I’ll ’

‘Not in the very least! That is,’ exclaimed Mrs. Violet, pouting, ’if I’m to be considered. We’ll sit out all but the waltzes, and you shall tell me official secrets about the Rani. She put us up once, she’s a delicious old thing. Gave us string beds to sleep on and gold plate to eat from, and swore about every other word. She had been investing in Government paper, and it had dropped three points. “Just my damn luck!” she said. Wasn’t it exquisite? Captain Drake ’

‘Mrs. Innes ’

’I don’t want to be rude, but you’re a dreadful embarrassment. Mr. Holmcroft won’t tell you official secrets!’

‘If she would only behave!’ thought Madeline, looking on, ’I would tell her indeed I would at once.’

Colonel Innes detached himself from a group of men in mess dress as she appeared with the Worsleys, and let himself drift with the tide that brought them always together.

‘You are looking tired ill,’ she said, seriously, as they sought the unconfessed solace of each other’s eyes. ’Last night it was the Commander-in-Chief’s, and the night before the dance at Peliti’s. And again tonight. And you are not like those of us who can rest next morning you have always your heavy office work!’ She spoke with indignant, tender reproach, and he gave himself up to hearing it. ’You will have to take leave and go away,’ she insisted, foolishly.

’Leave! Good heavens, no! I wish all our fellows were as fit as I am. And ’

‘Yes?’ she said.

’Don’t pity me, dear friend. I don’t think it’s good for me. The world really uses me very well.’

‘Then it’s all right, I suppose,’ Madeline said, with sudden depression.

‘Of course it is. You are dining with us on the eighth?’

‘I’m afraid not, I’m engaged.’

’Engaged again? Don’t you want to break bread in my house, Miss Anderson?’ She was silent, and he insisted, ‘Tell me,’ he said.

She gave him instead a kind, mysterious smile.

‘I will explain to you what I feel about that some day,’ she said; ’some day soon. I can’t accept Mrs. Innes’s invitation for the eighth, but Brookes and I are going to take tea with the fakir’s monkeys on the top of Jakko tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Anybody else, or only Brookes?’

‘Only Brookes.’ And she thought she had abandoned coquetry!

‘Then may I come?’

‘Indeed you may.’

‘I really don’t know,’ reflected Madeline, as she caught another glimpse of Mrs. Innes vigorously dancing the reel opposite little Lord Billy in his Highland uniform, with her hands on her flowered-satin hips, ’that I am behaving very well myself.’

Chapter 3.VIII.

Horace Innes looked round his wife’s drawing-room as if he were making an inventory of it, carefully giving each article its value, which happened, however, to have nothing to do with rupees. Madeline Anderson had been saying something the day before about the intimacy and accuracy with which people’s walls expressed them, and though the commonplace was not new to him, this was the first time it had ever led him to scan his wife’s. What he saw may be imagined, but his only distinct reflection was that he had no idea that she had been photographed so variously or had so many friends who wore resplendent Staff uniforms. The relation of cheapness in porcelain ornaments to the lady’s individuality was beyond him, and he could not analyze his feelings of sitting in the midst of her poverty of spirit. Indeed, thinking of his ordinary unsusceptibility to such things, he told himself sharply that he was adding an affectation of discomfort to the others that he had to bear; and that if Madeline had not given him the idea it would never have entered his mind. The less, he mused, that one had to do with finicking feelings in this world the better. They were well enough for people who were tolerably conditioned in essentials he preferred this vagueness, even with himself, in connection with his marriage otherwise they added pricks. Besides he had that other matter to think of.

He thought of the other matter with such obvious irritation that the butler coming in to say that the ‘English water’ was finished, and how many dozen should he order, put a chair in its place instead, closed the door softly again, and went away. It was not good for the dignity of butlers to ask questions of any sort with a look of that kind under the eyebrows of the sahib. The matter was not serious, Colonel Innes told himself, but he would prefer by comparison to deal with matters that were serious. He knew Simla well enough to attach no overwhelming importance to things said about women at the Club, where the broadest charity prevailed underneath, and the idle comment of the moment had an intrinsic value as a distraction rather than a reflective one as a criticism. This consideration, however, was more philosophical in connection with other men’s wives. He found very little in it to palliate what he had overheard, submerged in the ‘Times of India’, that afternoon. And to put an edge on it, the thing had been said by one of his own juniors. Luckily the boy had left the room without discovering who was behind the ‘Times of India’. Innes felt that he should be grateful for having been spared the exigency of defending his wife against a flippant word to which she had very probably laid herself open. He was very angry, and it is perhaps not surprising that he did not pause to consider how far his anger was due to the humiliating necessity of speaking to her about it. She was coming at last though; she was in the hall. He would get it over quickly.

‘Goodbye!’ said Mrs. Innes at the door. ’No, I can’t possibly let you come in to tea. I don’t know how you have the conscience after drinking three cups at Mrs. Mickie’s, where I had no business to take you! Tomorrow? Oh, all right if you want to very badly. But I won’t promise you strawberries they’re nearly all gone.’

There was the sound of a departing pony’s trot, and Mrs. Innes came into the drawing-room.

’Good heavens, Horace! what are you sitting there for like a like a ghost? Why didn’t you make a noise or something, and why aren’t you at office? I can’t tell you how you startled me.’

‘It is early,’ Colonel Innes said. ’We are neither of us in the house, as a rule, at this hour.’

‘Coincidence!’ Violet turned a cool, searching glance on her husband, and held herself ready. ’I came home early because I want to alter the lace on my yellow bodice for tonight. It’s too disgusting as it is. But I was rather glad to get away from Mrs. Mickie’s lot. So rowdy!’

‘And I came because I had a special reason for wanting to speak to you.’

Mrs. Violet’s lips parted, and her breath, in spite of herself, came a little faster.

’As we are dining out tonight, I thought that if I didn’t catch you now I might not have another opportunity till tomorrow morning.’

’And it’s always a pity to spoil one’s breakfast. I can tell from your manner, mon ami, it’s something disagreeable. What have I been and gone and done?’

She was dancing, poor thing, in her little vulgar way, on hot iron. But her eyes kept their inconsistent coolness.

’I heard something today which you are not in the way of hearing. You have probably no conception that it could be said.’

’Then she has been telling other people. Absolutely the worst thing she could do!’ Mrs. Innes exclaimed privately, sitting unmoved, her face a little too expectant.

’You won’t be prepared for it you may be shocked and hurt by it. Indeed, I think there is no need to repeat it to you. But I must put you on your guard. Men are coarser, you know, than women; they are apt to put their own interpretation ’

‘What is it?’

There was a physical gasp, a sharpness in her voice that brought Innes’s eyes from the floor to her face.

‘I am sorry,’ he said, ’but don’t overestimate it, don’t let it worry you. It was simply a very impertinent a very disagreeable reference to you and Mr. Holmcroft, I think, in connection with the Dovedell’s picnic. It was a particularly silly thing as well, and I am sure no one would attach any importance to it, but it was said openly at the Club, and ’

‘Who said it?’ Mrs. Innes demanded.

A flood of colour rushed over her face. Horace marked that she blushed.

’I don’t know whether I ought to tell you, Violet. It certainly was not meant for your ears.’

’If I’m not to know who said it, I don’t see why I should pay any attention to it. Mere idle rumour ’

Innes bit his lip.

‘Captain Gordon said it,’ he replied.

’Bobby Gordon! Do tell me what he said! I’m dying to know. Was he very disagreeable? I did give his dance away on Thursday night.’

Innes looked at her with the curious distrust which she often inspired in him. He had a feeling that he would like to put her out of the room into a place by herself, and keep her there.

‘I won’t repeat what he said.’ Colonel Innes took up the ’Saturday Review’.

‘Oh, do, Horace! I particularly want to know.’

Innes said nothing.

’Horace! Was it was it anything about Mr. Holmcroft being my Secretariat baa-lamb?’

‘If you adorn your guess with a little profanity,’ said Innes, acidly, ‘you won’t be far wrong.’

Mrs. Violet burst into a peal of laughter.

‘Why, you old goose!’ she articulated, behind her handkerchief; ’he said that to me.’

Innes laid down the ‘Saturday Review’.

‘To you!’ he repeated; ‘Gordon said it to you!’

‘Rather!’ Mrs. Violet was still mirthful. ’I’m not sure that he didn’t call poor little Homie something worse than that. It’s the purest jealousy on his part nothing to make a fuss about.’

The fourth skin which enables so many of us to be callous to all but the relative meaning of careless phrases had not been given to Innes, and her words fell upon his bare sense of propriety.

‘Jealous,’ he said, ’of a married woman? I find that difficult to understand.’

Violet’s face straightened out.

’Don’t be absurd, Horace. These boys are always jealous of somebody or other it’s the occupation of their lives! I really don’t see how one can prevent it.’

’It seems to me that a self-respecting woman should see how. Your point of view in these matters is incomprehensible.’

‘Perhaps,’ Violet was driven by righteous anger to say, ’you find Miss Anderson’s easier to understand.’

Colonel Innes’s face took its regimental disciplinary look, and, though his eyes were aroused, his words were quiet with repression.

‘I see no reason to discuss Miss Anderson with you,’ he said. ’She has nothing to do with what we are talking about.’

’Oh, don’t you, really! Hasn’t she, indeed! I take it you are trying to make me believe that compromising things are said about Mr. Holmcroft and me at the Club. Well, I advise you to keep your ears open a little more, and listen to the things said about you and Madeline Anderson there. But I don’t suppose you would be in such a hurry to repeat them to her.’

Innes turned very white, and the rigidity of his face gave place to heavy dismay. His look was that of a man upon whom misfortune had fallen out of a clear sky. For an instant he stared at his wife. When he spoke his voice was altered.

‘For God’s sake!’ he said, ’let us have done with this pitiful wrangling. I dare say you can take care of yourself; at all events, I only meant to warn you. But now you must tell me exactly what you mean by this that you have said this about ’

‘The fat’s in the fire,’ was Mrs. Innes’s reflection.

‘Certainly, I’ll tell you ’

‘Don’t shout, please!’

’I mean simply that all Simla is talking about your affair with Miss Anderson. You may imagine that because you are fifteen years older than she is things won’t be thought of, but they are, and I hear it’s been spoken about at Viceregal Lodge. I know Lady Bloomfield has noticed it, for she herself mentioned it to me. I told her I hadn’t the slightest objection, and neither have I, but there’s an old proverb about people in glass houses. What are you going to do?’

Colonel Innes’s expression was certainly alarming, and he had made a step toward her that had menace in it.

‘I am going out,’ he said, and turned and left her to her triumph.

Chapter 3.IX.

She Violet had unspeakably vulgarized it, but it must be true it must be, to some extent, true. She may even have lied about it, but the truth was there, fundamentally, in the mere fact that it had been suggested to her imagination. Madeline’s name, which had come to be for him an epitome of what was finest and most valuable, most to be lived for, was dropping from men’s lips into a kind of an abyss of dishonourable suggestion. There was no way out of it or around it. It was a cloud which encompassed them, suddenly blackening down.

There was nothing that he could do nothing. Except, yes, of course that was obvious, as obvious as any other plain duty. Through his selfishness it had a beginning; in spite of his selfishness it should have an end. That went without saying. No more walks or rides. In a conventional way, perhaps but nothing deliberate, designed and never alone together. Gossip about flippant married women was bad enough, but that it should concern itself with an unprotected creature like Madeline was monstrous, incredible. He strode fiercely into the road round Jakko, and no little harmless snake, if it had crawled across his path, would have failed to suffer a quick fate under the guidance of his imagination. But there was nothing for him to kill, and he turned upon himself.

The sun went down into the Punjab and left great blue-and-purple hill worlds barring the passage behind him. The deodars sank waist deep into filmy shadow, and the yellow afterlight lay silently among the branches. A pink-haunched monkey lopading across the road with a great show of prudence seemed to have strayed into an unfamiliar country, and the rustling twigs behind him made an episode of sound. The road in perpetual curve between its little stone parapet and the broad flank of the hill rose and fell under the deodars; Innes took its slopes and its steepnesses with even, unslackened stride, aware of no difference, aware of little indeed except the physical necessity of movement, spurred on by a futile instinct that the end of his walk would be the end of his trouble his amazing, black, menacing trouble. A pony’s trot behind him struck through the silence like percussion-caps; all Jakko seemed to echo with it; and it came nearer insistent, purposeful but he was hardly aware of it until the creature pulled up beside him, and Madeline, slipping quickly off, said

‘I’m coming too.’

He took off his hat and stared at her. She seemed to represent a climax.

‘I’m coming too,’ she said. ’I’m tired of picking flies off the Turk, and he’s really unbearable about them tonight. Here, syce.’ She threw the reins to the man and turned to Innes with a smile of relief. ’I would much rather do a walk. Why you want me to come too, don’t you?’

His face was all one negative, and under the unexpectedness of it and the amazement of it her questioning eyes slowly filled with sudden, uncontrollable tears, so that she had to lower them, and look steadily at the hoof-marks in the road while she waited for his answer.

‘You know how I feel about seeing you how glad I always am,’ he stammered. ‘But there are reasons ’

‘Reasons?’ she repeated, half audibly.

’I don’t know how to tell you. I will write. But let me put you up again ’

‘I will not,’ Madeline said, with a sob, ’I won’t be sent home like a child. I am going to walk, but but I can quite well go alone.’ She started forward, and her foot caught in her habit so that she made an awkward stumble and came down on her knee. In rising she stumbled again, and his quick arm was necessary. Looking down at her, he saw that she was crying bitterly. The tension had lasted long, and the snap had come when she least expected it.

‘Stop,’ Innes said, firmly, hardly daring to turn his head and ascertain the blessed fact that they were still alone. ’Stop instantly. You shall not go by yourself.’ He flicked the dust off her habit with his pocket-handkerchief. ‘Come, please; we will go on together.’ Her distress seemed to make things simple again. It was as if the cloud that hung over them had melted as she wept, and lifted, and drifted a little further on. For the moment, naturally, nothing mattered except that she should be comforted. As she walked by his side shaken with her effort at self-control, he had to resist the impulse to touch her. His hand tingled to do its part in soothing her, his arm ached to protect her, while he vaguely felt an element of right, of justice, in her tears; they were in a manner his own. What he did was to turn and ask the syce following if he had loosened the Turk’s saddle-girths.

‘I shall be better in a moment,’ Madeline said, and he answered, ’Of course’; but they walked on and said nothing more until the road ran out from under the last deodar and round the first bare boulder that marked the beginning of the Ladies’ Mile. It lay rolled out before them, the Ladies’ Mile, sinuous and grey and empty, along the face of the cliff; they could see from one end of it to the other. It was the bleak side of Jakko; even tonight there was a fresh springing coldness in it blowing over from the hidden snows behind the rims of the nearer hills. Madeline held up her face to it, and gave herself a moment of its grateful discipline.

‘I have been as foolish as possible,’ she said, ’as foolish as possible. I have distressed you. Well, I couldn’t help it that is all there is to be said. Now if you will tell me what is in your mind what you spoke of writing I will mount again and go home. It doesn’t matter I know you didn’t mean to be unkind.’ Her lip was trembling again, and he knew it, and dared not look at it.

‘How can you ask me to tell you miserable things!’ he exclaimed. ’How can I find the words? And I have only just been told I can hardly myself conceive it ’

’I am not a child in her teens that my ears should be guarded from miserable things. I have come of age, I have entered into my inheritance of the world’s bitterness with the rest. I can listen,’ Madeline said. ‘Why not?’

He looked to her with grave tenderness. ’You think yourself very old, and very wise about the world,’ he said; ’but you are a woman, and you will be hurt. And when I think that a little ordinary forethought on my part would have protected you, I feel like the criminal I am.’

‘Don’t make too much of it,’ she said, simply. ‘I have a presentiment ’

‘I’ll tell you,’ Innes said, slowly; ’I won’t niggle about it. The people of this place idiots! are unable to believe that a man and a woman can be to each other what we are.’

‘Yes?’ said Madeline. She paused beside the parapet and looked down at the indistinct little fields below, and the blurred masses of white wild roses waving midway against the precipice.

’They can not understand that there can be any higher plane of intercourse between us than the one they know. They won’t see they can’t see that the satisfaction we find in being together is of a different nature.’

‘I see,’ said Madeline. She had raised her eyes, and they sought the solemn lines of the horizon. She looked as if she saw something infinitely lifted above the pettiness he retailed to her.

‘So they say good God, why should I tell you what they say!’ It suddenly flashed upon him that the embodiment of it in words would be at once, from him, sacrilegious and ludicrous. It flashed upon him that her natural anger would bring him pain, and that if she laughed it was so hard to tell when she would laugh it would be as if she struck him. He cast about him dumb and helpless while she kept her invincibly quiet gaze upon the farther hills. She was thinking that this breath of gossip, now that it had blown, was a very slight affair compared with Horace Innes’s misery which he did not seem to understand. Then her soul rose up in her, brushing everything aside, and forgetting, alas! the vow it had once made to her.

‘I think I know,’ she said. ’They are indeed foolish. They say that we love each other. Is not that what they say?’

He looked in amazement into her tender eyes and caught at the little mocking smile about her lips. Suddenly the world grew light about him, the shadows fled away. Somewhere down in the valley, he remembered afterward, a hill-flute made music. When he spoke it was almost in a whisper, lest he should disturb some newly perceived lovely thing that had wings, and might leave him. ‘Oh, Madeline,’ he said, ‘is it true?’ She only smiled on in gladness that took no heed of any apprehension, any fear or scruple, and he himself keeping his eyes upon her face, said, ‘It is true.’

So they stood for a little time in silence while she resisted her great opportunity. She resisted it to the end, and presently beckoned to the syce, who came up leading the pony. Innes mounted her mechanically and said, ‘Is that all right?’ as she put her foot in the stirrup, without knowing that he had spoken.

‘Goodbye,’ she said; ’I am going away immediately. It will be better. And listen I have known this for weeks and I have gone on seeing you. And I hope I am not any more wicked than I feel. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye,’ he said, taking his hand from the pony’s neck, and she rode buoyantly away. He, turning to breast the road again, saw darkness gathering over the end of it, and drawing nearer.

At eleven o’clock next morning Brookes rose from her packing to take a note addressed to her mistress from the hand of a messenger in the Imperial red and gold. It ran:

’Dear Miss Anderson I write to tell you that I have obtained three weeks’ leave, and I am going into the interior to shoot, starting this afternoon. You spoke yesterday of leaving Simla almost immediately. I trust you will not do this, as it would be extremely risky to venture down to the Plains just now. In ten days the rains will have broken, when it will be safe. Pray wait till then.

’Yours sincerely,

‘Horace Innes.’

Involuntarily the letter found its way to Madeline’s lips, and remained there until she saw the maid observing her with intelligence.

‘Brookes,’ she said, ’I am strongly advised not to start until the rains break. I think, on the whole, that we won’t.’

‘Indeed, miss,’ returned Brookes, ’Mrs. Sergeant Simmons told me that it was courting cholera to go and nothing short of it. I must say I’m thankful.’

Chapter 3.X.

A week later Colonel Innes had got his leave, and had left Simla for the snow-line by what is facetiously known as ‘the carriage road to Tibet.’ Madeline had done as she was bidden, and was waiting for the rains to break. Another day had come without them. To write and tell Innes, to write to tell Violet, to go away and leave the situation as she found it; she had lived and moved and slept and awakened to these alternatives. At the moment she slept.

It was early, very early in the morning. The hills all about seemed still unaware of it, standing in the greyness, compact, silent, immutable, as if they slept with their eyes open. Nothing spoke of the oncoming sun, nothing was yet surprised. The hill world lifted itself unconscious in a pale solution of daylight, and only on the sky-line, very far away, it rippled into a cloud. The flimsy town clinging steeply roof above roof to the slope, mounting to the saddle and slipping over on the other side, cut the dawn with innumerable little lines and angles all in one tone like a pencil drawing.

There was no feeling in it, no expression. It had a temporary air in that light, like trampled snow, and even the big Secretariat buildings that raised themselves here and there out of the huddling bazaar looked trivial, childish enterprises in the simple revelation of the morning. A cold silence was abroad, which a crow now and then vainly tried to disturb with a note of tentative enterprise, forced, premature. It announced that the sun would probably rise, but nothing more. In the little dark shops of the wood-carvers an occasional indefinite figure moved, groping among last night’s tools, or an old woman in a red sari washed a brass dish over the shallow open drain that ran past her door. At the tonga terminus, below the Mall, a couple of coughing syces, muffled in their blankets, pulled one of these vehicles out of the shed. They pushed it about sleepily, with clumsy futility; nothing else stirred or spoke at all in Simla. Nothing disturbed Miss Anderson asleep in her hotel.

A brown figure in a loin-cloth, with a burden, appeared where the road turned down from the Mall, and then another, and several following. They were coolies, and they carried luggage.

The first to arrive beside the tonga bent and loosed the trunk he brought, which slipped from his back to the ground. The syces looked at him, saying nothing, and he straightened himself against the wall of the hillside, also in silence. It was too early for conversation. Thus did all the others.

When the last portmanteau had been deposited, a khaki-coloured heap on the shed floor rose up as a broad-shouldered Punjabi driver, and walked round the luggage, looking at it.

‘And you, owls’ brethren,’ he said, with sarcasm, addressing the first coolie, ’you have undertaken to carry these matter fifty-eight kos to Kalka, have you?’

‘Na,’ replied the coolie, stolidly, and spat.

‘How else, then, is it to be taken?’ the driver cried, with anger in his argument. ’Behold the memsahib has ordered but one tonga, and a fool-thing of an ekka. Here is work for six tongas! What reason is there in this?’

The coolie folded his naked arms, and dug in the dust with an unconcerned toe.

‘I, what can I do?’ he said, ‘It is the order of the memsahib.’

Ram Singh grunted and said no more. A rickshaw was coming down from the Mall, and the memsahib was in it.

Ten minutes later the ponies stood in their traces under the iron bar, and the lady sat in the tonga behind Ram Singh. Her runners, in uniform, waited beside the empty rickshaw with a puzzled look, at which she laughed, and threw a rupee to the head man.

The luggage was piled and corded on three ekkas behind, and their cross-legged drivers, too, were ready.

‘Chellao!’ she cried, crisply, and Ram Singh imperturbably lifted the reins. The little procession clanked and jingled along the hillside, always tending down, and broke upon the early grey melancholy with a forced and futile cheerfulness, too early, like everything else. As it passed the last of Simla’s little gardens, spread like a pocket-handkerchief on the side of the hill, the lady leaned forward and looked back as if she wished to impress the place upon her memory. Her expression was that of a person going forth without demur into the day’s hazards, ready to cope with them, yet there was some regret in the backward look.

‘It’s a place,’ she said aloud, ‘where everybody has a good time!’

Then the Amusement Club went out of sight behind a curve; and she settled herself more comfortably among her cushions, and drew a wrap round her to meet the chill wind of the valley. It was all behind her. The lady looked out as the ponies galloped up to the first changing-place, and, seeing a saddled horse held by a syce, cramped herself a little into one corner to make room. The seat would just hold two.

Ram Singh salaamed, getting down to harness the fresh pair, and a man put his face in at the side of the tonga and took off his hat.

‘Are you all right?’ he said. His smile was as conscious as his words were casual.

’Quite right. The ayah was silly about coming didn’t want to leave her babies or something so I had to leave her behind. Everything else is either here or in the ekkas.’

’The brute! Never mind they’re not much use in a railway journey. You can pick up another at Bombay. Then I suppose I’d better get in.’

‘I suppose you better had. Unless you think of walking,’ she laughed, and he took the place beside her.

Ram Singh again unquestioningly took up the reins.

‘Nobody else going down?’

‘Not another soul. We might just as well have started together.’

‘Oh, well, we couldn’t tell. Beastly awkward if there had been anybody.’

‘Yes,’ she said, but thrust up her under lip indifferently.

Then, with the effect of turning to the business in hand, she bent her eyes upon him understandingly and smiled in frank reference to something that had not been mentioned. ‘It’s goodbye Simla, isn’t it?’ she said. He smiled in response and put his hand upon her firm, round arm, possessively, and they began to talk.

Ram Singh, all unaware, kept his horses at their steady clanking downward gallop, and Simla, clinging to the hilltops, was brushed by the first rays of the sun.

It came a gloriously clear morning; early riders round Jakko saw the real India lying beyond the outer ranges, flat and blue and pictured with forests and rivers like a map. The plains were pretty and interesting in this aspect, but nobody found them attractive. Sensitive people liked it better when the heat mist veiled them and it was possible to look abroad without a sudden painful thought of contrasting temperatures. We may suppose that the inhabitants of Paradise sometimes grieve over their luck. Even Madeline Anderson, whose heart knew no constriction at the remembrance of brother or husband at some cruel point in the blue expanse, had come to turn her head more willingly the other way, towards the hills rolling up to the snows, being a woman who suffered by proxy, and by observation, and by Rudyard Kipling.

On this particular morning, however, she had not elected to do either. She slept late instead, and was glad to sleep. I might as well say at once that on the night before she had made up her mind, had brought herself to the point, and had written to Mrs. Innes, at ‘Two Gables’, all the facts, in so far as she was acquainted with them, connected with Frederick Prendergast’s death. She was very much ashamed of herself, poor girl; she was aware that, through her postponement, Horace Innes would now see his problem in all its bitterness, make his choice with his eyes wide open. If it had only happened before he knew anything about her!

She charged herself with having deliberately waited, and then spent an exhausting hour trying to believe that she had drifted unconsciously to the point of their mutual confession. Whatever the truth was, she did not hesitate to recognize a new voice in her private counsels from that hour, urging her in one way or another to bring matters to an end. It was a strong instinct; looking at the facts, she saw it was the gambler’s. When she tried to think of the ethical considerations involved she saw only the chances. The air seemed to throb with them all night; she had to count them finally to get rid of them.

Brookes was up betimes, however, and sent off the letter. It went duly, by Surnoo, to Mrs. Innes at ‘Two Gables’. Madeline woke at seven with a start, and asked if it had gone, then slept again contentedly. So far as she was concerned the thing was finished. The breakfast gong had sounded, and the English mail had arrived before she opened her eyes again upon the day’s issues; she gave it her somewhat desultory attention while Brookes did her hair. There was only one scrap of news. Adele mentioned in a postscript that poor Mr. Prendergast’s money was likely to go to a distant relative, it having transpired that he died without leaving a will.

‘She is sure, absolutely sure,’ Madeline mused, ’to answer my letter in person. She will be here within an hour. I shall have this to tell her, too. How pleased she will be! She will come into it all, I suppose if she is allowed. Though she won’t be allowed, that is if ’ But there speculation began, and Madeline had forbidden herself speculation, if not once and for all, at least many times and for fifteen minutes.

No reasonable purpose would be served by Mrs. Innes’s visit, Madeline reflected, as she sat waiting in the little room opening on the veranda; but she would come, of course she would come. She would require the satisfaction of the verbal assurance; she would hope to extract more details; she would want the objectionable gratification of talking if over.

In spite of any assurance, she would believe that Madeline had not told her before in order to make her miserable a little longer than she need be; but, after all, her impression about that did not particularly matter. It couldn’t possibly be a pleasant interview, yet Madeline found herself impatient for it.

‘Surnoo,’ she said of her messenger, ’must be idling on his way back in the bazaar. I must try to remember to fine him two pice. Surnoo is incorrigible.’

She forgot, however, to fine Surnoo. The pad of his bare feet sounded along the veranda almost immediately, and the look in his Pahari eyes was that of expected reproach, and ability to defend himself against it.

He held out two letters at arm’s-length, for as he was expected to bring only one there was a fault in this; and all his domestic traditions told him that he might be chastened. One was addressed to Madeline in Mrs. Innes’s handwriting; the other, she saw with astonishment, was her own communication to that lady, her own letter returned. Surnoo explained volubly all the way along the veranda, and in the flood of his unknown tongue Madeline caught a sentence or two.

‘The memsahib was not,’ said Surnoo. Clearly he could not deliver a letter to a memsahib who was not. ‘Therefore,’ Surnoo continued, ’I have brought back your honour’s letter, and the other I had from the hand of the memsahib’s runner, the runner with one eye, who was on the road to bring it here. More I do not know, but it appears that the memsahib has gone to her father and mother in Belaat, being very sorrowful because the Colonel-sahib has left her to shoot.’

‘The letter will tell me,’ said Madeline to herself, fingering it. ‘Enough, Surnoo.’

The man went away, and Madeline closed and locked the door of her sitting-room. The letter would tell her what? She glanced about her with dissatisfaction, and sought the greater privacy of her bedroom, where also she locked the door and drew the muslin curtain across the window. She laid the letter on the dressing-table and kept her eyes upon it while she unfastened, with trembling hands, the brooch at her neck and the belt at her waist. She did one or two other meaningless things, as if she wanted to gain time, to fortify her nerves even against an exhibition before herself.

Then she sat down with her back towards the light and opened the letter. It had a pink look and a scented air. Even in her beating suspense Madeline held it a little farther away from her, as she unfolded it, and it ran:

’Dear Miss Anderson What will you say, I wonder, and what will Simla say, when you know that Captain Drake and I have determined to disregard CONVENTIONALITIES, and live henceforward only for one another! I am all packed up, and long before this meets your eye we shall have taken the step which society condemns, but which I have a feeling that you, knowing my storm-tossed history, will be broad-minded enough to sympathize with, at least to some extent. That is the reason I am writing to you rather than to any of my own chums, and also of course to have the satisfaction of telling you that I no longer care what you do about letting out the secret of my marriage to Frederick Prendergast. I am now above and beyond it. Any way you look at it, I do not see that I am much to blame. As I never have been Colonel Innes’s wife there can be no harm in leaving him, though if he had ever been sympathetic, or understood me the least little bit, I might have felt bound to him. But he has never been able to evoke the finer parts of my nature, and when this is the case marriage is a mere miserable fleshly failure. You may say, “Why try it a third time?” but my union with Val will be different. I have never been fond of the opposite sex so far as that goes I should have made a very good nun but for a long time Valentine Drake has been the only man I cared to have come within a mile of me, and lately we have discovered that we are absolutely necessary to each other’s existence on the higher plane. I don’t care much what Simla thinks, but if you happen to be talking about it to dear Lady Bloomfield, you might just mention this. Val has eight hundred a year of his own, so it is perfectly practicable. Of course, he will send in his papers. Whatever happens, Val and I will never bind ourselves in any way. We both think it wrong and enslaving. I have nothing more to add, except that I am depending on you to explain to Simla that I never was Mrs. Innes.

’Yours sincerely,

’Violet Prendergast.

’P.S. I have written to Horace, telling him everything about everything, and sent my letter off to him in the wilds by a runner. If you see him you might try and smooth him down. I don’t want him coming after Val with a revolver.’

Madeline read this communication through twice. Then quietly and deliberately she lay down upon the bed, and drew herself out of the control of her heart by the hard labour of thought. When she rose, she had decided that there were only two things for her to do, and she began at once to do them, continuing her refuge in action. She threw her little rooms open again, and walked methodically round the outer one, collecting the odds and ends of Indian fabrics with which she had garnished it.

As the maid came in, she looked up from folding them.

‘I have news, Brookes,’ she said, ’that necessitates my going home at once. No, it is not bad news, but important. I will go now and see about the tonga. We must start tomorrow morning.’

Brookes called Surnoo, and the rickshaw came round.

Madeline looked at her watch.

‘The telegraph office,’ she said; ‘and as quickly as may be.’

As the runners panted over the Mall, up and down and on, Madeline said to herself, ‘She shall have her chance. She shall choose.’

The four reeking Paharis pulled up at the telegraph office, and Madeline sped up the steps. There was a table, with forms printed ’Indian Telegraphs,’ and the usual bottle of thickened ink and pair of rusty pens. She sat down to her intention as if she dared not let it cool; she wrote her message swiftly, she had worded it on the way.

’To Mrs. Innes, Dak Bungalow, Solon.

’From M. Anderson, Simla.

’Frederick Prendergast died on January 7th, at Sing Sing. Your letter considered confidential if you return. Prendergast left no will.

‘M. Anderson.’

‘Send this “urgent,” Babu,’ she said to the clerk, ’and repeat it to the railway station, Kalka. Shall I fill up another form? No? Very well.’

At the door she turned and came back.

‘It is now eleven o’clock,’ she said. ’The person I am telegraphing to is on her way down to get tonight’s train at Kalka. I am hoping to catch her half-way at Solon. Do you think I can?’

’I think so, madam. Oyess! It is the custom to stop at Solon for tiffin. The telegram can arrive there. All urgent telegram going very quick.’

‘And in any case,’ said Madeline, ’it can not fail to reach her at Kalka?’

‘Not possible to fail, madam.’

‘She will have her chance,’ she said to herself, on her way to the post office to order her tonga. And with a little nauseated shudder at the thought of the letter in her pocket, she added, ’It is amazing. I should have thought her too good a woman of business!’ After which she concentrated her whole attention upon the necessities of departure. Her single immediate apprehension was that Horace Innes might, by some magic of circumstances, be transported back into Simla before she could get out of it. That such a contingency was physically impossible made no difference to her nerves, and to the last Brookes was the hurrying victim of unnecessary promptings.

The little rambling hotel of Kalka, where the railway spreads out over the plains, raises its white-washed shelter under the very walls of the Himalayas. Madeline, just arrived, lay back in a long wicker chair on the veranda, and looked up at them as they mounted green and grey and silent under the beating of the first of the rains. Everywhere was a luxury of silence, the place was steeped in it, drowned in it. A feeding cow flicked an automatic tail under a tree. Near the low mud wall that strolled irresolutely between the house and the hills leaned a bush with a few single pink roses; their petals were floating down under the battering drops. A draggled bee tried to climb to a dry place on a pillar of the veranda. Above all, the hills, immediate, towering, all grey and green, solidly ideal, with phantasies of mist. Everything drippingly soft and silent. Suddenly the venetian blind that hung before the door of a bedroom farther on swayed out before a hand variously ringed to emit a lady in a pink lawn dress with apt embroideries. Madeline’s half-closed eyes opened very wide, and for an instant she and the lady, to whom I must once more refer as Mrs. Innes, confronted each other. Then Mrs. Innes’s countenance expanded, and she took three or four light steps forward.

‘Oh, you dear thing!’ she exclaimed. ’I thought you were in Simla! Imagine you being here! Do you know you have saved me!’

Madeline regarded her in silence, while a pallor spread over her face and lips, and her features grew sharp with a presage of pain.

‘Have I?’ she stammered. She could not think.

’Indeed you have. I don’t know how to be grateful enough to you. Your telegram of yesterday reached me at Solon. We had just sat down to tiffin. Nothing will ever shake my faith in providence again! My dear, think of it after all I’ve been through, my darling Val and one hundred thousand pounds!’

‘Well?’

’Well I stayed behind there last night, and Val came on here and made the necessary arrangement, and ’

‘Yes?’

’And we were married this morning. Good heavens! What’s the matter with you! Here oh, Brookes! Water, salts anything!’

Brookes, I know, would think that I should dwell at greater length upon Miss Anderson’s attack of faintness in Kalka, and the various measures which were resorted to for her succour, but perhaps the feelings and expedients of any really capable lady’s-maid under the circumstances may be taken for granted. I feel more seriously called upon to explain that Colonel Horace Innes, shortly after these last events, took two years’ furlough to England, during which he made a very interesting tour in the United States with the lady with now bears his name by inalienable right. Captain and Mrs. Valentine Drake are getting the most that is to be had out of Frederick Prendergast’s fortune with courage in London and the European capitals, where Mrs. Drake is sometimes mentioned as a lady with a romantic past. They have not returned to Simla, where the situation has never been properly understood. People always supposed that Mrs. Drake ran away that June morning with her present husband, who must have been tremendously fond of her to have married her ’after the divorce.’ She is also occasionally mentioned in undertones as ’the first Mrs. Innes.’ All of which we know to be quite erroneous, like most scandal.

Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge, in retirement, are superintending the education of their children in Bedford, where it is cheap and practical. They converse when they meet about the iniquitous prices of dressmakers and the degeneracy of the kind of cook obtainable in England at eighteen pounds a year. Mrs. Gammidge has grown rather portly and very ritualistic. They seldom speak of Simla, and when they do, if too reminiscent a spark appears in Mrs. Mickie’s eye, Mrs. Gammidge changes the subject. Kitty Vesey still fills her dance cards at Viceregal functions, though people do not quote her as they used to, and subalterns imagine themselves vastly witty about her colour, which is unimpaired. People often commend her, however, for her good nature to debutantes, and it is admitted that she may still ride with credit in ’affinity stakes’ and occasionally win them.