THE PLAGUE OF
THE HEART

BY

FRANCIS PREVOST

AUTHOR OF "FALSE DAWN" "BUST OF GOLD" "ON THE VERGE"
"ENTANGLEMENTS" ETC ETC

LONDON
WARD, LOCK & CO LIMITED
NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE
1902

TO APRIL

Contents

THE SIEGE OF SAR
HER REPUTATION
THE MEASURE OF A MAN

The Siege of Sar

I

"Have you heard, Captain Terrington?" cried the girl gaily. "There's to be a Durbar after all! So you were wrong. It's to be in the Palace too, that you were so set against, and Lewis and Mr. Langford are going with Sir Colvin, and just the littlest guard of honour for the look of the thing. Sir Colvin says the great thing with these sort of people is to show you're not afraid, and I'm perfectly certain he's right."

She sat upon the table, all in white; her hat slung upon her arm, her feet swinging to and fro amid the muslin fulness of her skirt, pointing her remarks with the tips of their gilded slippers.

The man who had just entered the bungalow in khaki riding kit stood a straight six feet. His face, strong and silent, was as brown as his jacket, and his spare figure had an air of tempered energy. The only break in its entire brownness was the faded strip of ribands on his left breast. At the sight of Mrs. Chantry he had checked the stride with which he entered, lifted his helmet, and pushed back from his forehead its damp brown lock of hair.

As he stood staring at her with a frown, she set her wrists on the edge of the table, and rocked her body gently in time with her feet.

"Well!" she exclaimed with a laugh as he stopped before her; "what did I tell you? I said if you'd only leave Sar for a week I'd get the Durbar, and I've got it in three days!"

She ceased her swinging, and looked up at him with an excited triumph in her eyes. "Well?" she repeated provocatively, leaning back and putting the tip of a tiny tongue between her lips.

He drew a wicker chair from the wall and threw himself into it with a sigh.

"I only hope it isn't true," he said.

She leaned forward over the table, gripping its edge, her face thrust out, like a figure on a ship's prow.

"Honest Injun!" she cried, sparkling. "Every word. Durbar to-morrow. Khan's guard and tom-toms round at eleven, and off we march at noon. Oh! don't you wish you were going?"

"Not at all," he said drily. "I've never wished to die like a trapped mouse."

She drew herself up resentfully.

"How dare you say that," she cried; "when you know Lewis will be there!"

"All right," he said, too tired to argue; "I'll try to see its good points. How did this happen?"

She was a flouting pouting bird again at once.

"I did it," she declared.

"Oh, did you," he replied without conviction. "When?"

"The moment you started foraging. You're the only man in Sar who doesn't care a da—— a fig for what I think, so I had to wait till you were gone. The others!"

She gave a shrug to her pretty shoulders.

"Well?" enquired Terrington.

"Well, a woman's only got to let a man see she thinks he's afraid of anything to put him at it. I let 'em all see," she said, smiling.

He looked at her hard.

"You think I couldn't?" she challenged.

"I've never thought of anything you couldn't," he said simply.

She looked at him, laughing softly. Then, raising herself on her wrists, poised her dainty figure above the table, letting it swing between her arms, while she met with the fluttering twist of a smile the intent displeasure in his eyes.

"What did you do it for?" he asked.

She pushed herself back along the polished table till her knees and knuckles were side by side.

"What does a woman ever do anything for?" she retorted, leaning over her perch with her elbows upon her knees. "To show she can," she added, as he offered no solution. "I was going to let you see you weren't the king of Sar."

"Good God," he groaned in weary bewilderment. "Where's Sir Colvin?"

She shook her head slowly, smiling, from side to side.

"Don' know, don' know, don' know!" she babbled. "What did you get?"

He took no notice of the question.

"And your husband?" he said.

"Lewis is with Sir Colvin. May be anywhere. Probably messing up my room. They're preparing for the Durbar," she drawled with soft malice.

His preoccupation paid no heed to it; and she went on:

"It's wonderful the hours we do things at here. Just decent breakfast-time and we've had half a day. When did your Majesty breakfast?" she asked.

"Some time yesterday," he said indifferently. "Has Gale written?"

But she was on her feet at once.

"Oh, I say!" she cried. "How horrid of you not to tell me!"

The tatties on the anteroom entrance had closed behind her, like reeds behind a snowy pheasant, ere she finished speaking, and Terrington could hear the "Kitmatgar, O Kitmatgar!" of her lifted childish voice ring along the empty mess-room.

II

As Rose Chantry left the room the light went out of Terrington's face, and an irresistible lassitude crept like a gray smoke across it. He had been for three days in the saddle, with but a couple of his own guides, in a country cut by torrents from precipitous stone, among a silent and lurking people who were only waiting the word to murder him, and for the last day and night he had been living on food snatched from a holster as he rode.

There was no one in Sar to whom he could delegate the duty; no one acquainted as he with the country and the people; no one who knew so intimately their private avarices and animosities; no one who could utilize their tribal treacheries and pretensions, to extract from them the grain they had a mind to keep. They had known him five years before, while Sar was as yet unembroiled of its neighbours, and still admitted British influence and rupees, when his shooting feats had won him the nickname by which everywhere he was known, and the friendship of the men who were waiting now, without breach of friendliness, to put an end to him.

It was on account of this intimate acquaintance that he had been selected to command the escort which accompanied Sir Colvin Aire, whose mission was to settle finally the standing of a resident, and of road repair and protection between Sar and the frontier.

Such simple questions hung however like dewdrops on the web of a wide and hostile political influence. Their disappearance would only be of importance as a signal that the meshes had been cut.

Lewis Chantry had watched the network spreading during the six months he had served as political officer at Sar.

He had smiled at it with a soldier's easy optimism, until he tripped one day upon a strand that was being woven between him and home.

The Indian Government, palsied by a political change of control, and a demand for immediate cheapness however costly, answered his urgent appeals with vague precepts of compromise and Sir Colvin Aire.

Sir Colvin was not cheap, but, from possessing no previous acquaintance with the question, and being the most easily available and palpably the wrong person, he had, at any rate, an air of cheapness.

He was a big genial man, with no sense of his own importance, and a fixed belief in bluffness. He had shewn Terrington his instructions, some six weeks earlier, on the night his escort joined him, and the two were sitting smoking after dinner outside the tent—the stillness of the evening only broken by the cry of a jackal or the scream of an owl—looking up at the black mountain wall that blotted out the northern stars, over which they were to climb on the morrow to an unknown fate.

"You see, they say I'm to make the fullest use of your knowledge of the country," concluded Sir Colvin, as Terrington replaced the lantern by which he had been reading, and lay back in his chair.

"I see," he replied quietly; "but they were careful to make no use of it themselves."

"You're not in love with the trip?" asked the other.

"Oh, yes, sir, I'm charmed with it," said the younger man; "but I'm sorry for the chaps that will have to fetch us back."

"What do you mean?" asked his chief slowly.

Terrington stretched out his hand into the soft night air.

"It's summer here, sir," he said with seeming irrelevance, "and summer at Simla; summer for three full months. It's summer at Sar too; but in four weeks there will be snow on the passes, on the Palári and Darai; and, in six, whoever goes out of Sar that way," and he nodded towards India, "goes because he must."

"You think we may have to winter there?" asked Sir Colvin.

"I took a liberal view of the time we might spend there, sir, and asked at Sampur for five hundred spare rounds a man."

"Cartridges!" exclaimed the Commissioner.

"Yes, sir. Colonel Davis thought they might come in useful, and let me have what they had. Then there was a Maxim they were doubtful about——-"

"My good man!" broke in the other; "do you take this for an expeditionary force?"

"No, sir," replied the soldier. "I knew we were an escort, so I packed the Maxim on a mule. There's a corner in the old fort at Sar, I remembered, that it would look well in: and I thought, if we had to spend the winter there, we might make the place as cosy as we could. I meant to tell you, sir, as I had to requisition some extra transport, and I scheduled the lot as 'gifts for the Khan.'"

"Well, I must say you're a cool hand!" gasped his chief.

"I thought we'd be sure to let him have them if he came for them," explained Terrington simply; "so it read all right. I wasn't quite clear if a Maxim could be included under necessary equipment!"

"Oh, you weren't, weren't you," exclaimed the other. "And how do you think I'm to explain it?"

"Wouldn't it come under my knowledge of the country of which you were to make the fullest use, sir?" was the innocent reply.

Sir Colvin laughed, and the talk turned on what he held to be the peaceable possibilities of Sar. On that subject Terrington could hold nothing but his tongue. He was an adept at minding his own business, but he tried on the way up country to illuminate his chief's views of the men with whom he had to deal, by tales of Sari humour, which were mostly pointed by the decapitation or disembowelment of the humorist's best friend.

At Sar the Mission found everything in silver paper. It was met imposingly at the Gate of the Great Evil, ten miles below the city, where the river tears a way through rocks of black basalt, and had eaten there the salted cake of a sacred hospitality.

It was welcomed into Sar by the bellowings of an unspeakable music, and for three days the bearers of gifts and good wishes wore a path through the Bazar between the Residency and the New Palace.

Chantry reported a pleasing change in the Khan's bearing since the Mission had been appointed, his affability, attention to protests and anxiety for the comfort of the new comers.

Out of this very consideration arose the first note of discord, owing, as Chantry put it under his breath, to Terrington's "damned pigheadedness."

His own guard of Sikhs, Dogras and Bakót levies had been housed in the Old Palace, now called the Fort, a low mud and stone building, whose brown walls of astounding thickness rose hard upon the green tangle of chenar in which the Residency stood. The little force fitted it as scantily as a wizened kernel fits its shell, and, although the river washed the Fort's eastern face and secured that from assault, was too scant to hold it. The addition of the odd two hundred of the Commissioner's escort made defence quite another matter.

The Khan knew that, and with many apologies for the lack of accommodation in the Fort, cleared out his own barracks on the other side of the river, and put them with immense affability and the stores they contained at Chantry's disposal for the escort's occupation.

Chantry, unable ever to credit any one with less than his own share of honour, accepted gratefully on the Commissioner's behalf, glad to be relieved from a further cleansing of the Fort and from the pressing difficulty of provisions.

He explained the arrangement to Sir Colvin, as the Guides swung out of the brown mob of Saris, past the guard of honour into the Residency compound, and formed front with their own undauntable swagger before Rose Chantry's smiling eyes.

Aire listened attentively, with his eye on the frail figure in heliotrope on the verandah.

"Sounds all that's desirable," he said; "but I'm not the one to settle it. There's your man," he nodded, as Terrington rode up to report.

Terrington's hard stare swept the city as the proposal was repeated, a grim smile darkening his mouth.

"Very considerate of the old gentleman," he said slowly; "but I think we'll stay here."

Chantry exploded with difficulties. The Fort wasn't habitable; he couldn't face the question of supply; the Khan would be insulted; the difficulty of negotiations increased. He turned to Sir Colvin imploringly, but the Commissioner shook his head.

"Delegation of authority," he purred. "Mine's political!"

"But what am I to tell the Khan?" cried Chantry in expostulation. "Am I to say that you're afraid?"

Terrington's stare had included absently the other's face.

"Tell the old fox," he said, "that I'm delighted to have a political officer to make my explanations. Last time we met I had, as he'll remember, to make them myself."

He asked Sir Colvin's permission to fall the men out for dinner, and rode back without a further word about the Fort. He was unused in the matter of orders either to ask or answer questions.

Chantry made a despairing but fruitless appeal to the Commissioner, who replied that, having entrusted Terrington with absolute discretion in the military affairs of the Mission, he could not interfere.

"Good man," he concluded; "dam good man! Can talk through my Pukhtu, and cooks like a chef. You'll get used to him, if you stand in with him. But he'd clear out the devil if he got in his way."

Sir Colvin had learnt something from the daring fashion in which Terrington had held up the various Khels, ill-affected most of them, but all blandly amiable, from which the Mission had accepted hospitality on the road to Sar.

He had fixed each, as he approached it, in a grip of steel; covered its avenues, commanded its towers, as if about to exterminate a nest of hornets; but he had entered with an air of unconcerned good-fellowship, as though the rifles ranged without to avenge him and the naked steel at his elbow had no real existence.

"What's about the risk in these places?" Sir Colvin had asked on quitting one of the most forbidding.

"Never can tell," replied Terrington with a shrug. "Treachery with these chaps is like a hiccup. It often comes as a surprise, even to the man who has it."

"And don't they rather resent your precautions?"

"Oh, not a bit! they admire them. It's part of the style of a gentleman hereabouts to distrust your neighbour so explicitly that he daren't misbehave. Prevents costly mistakes. The etiquette is to show him you can murder him, and then to credit him genially with too much sense to put you to the trouble."

The etiquette was complicated, as Terrington admitted, by the lasting advantages which infidel slaughter offers to one of the True Faith, very tempting to starving and houseless hill-men, with veins fired by a seductive Paradise.

But etiquette, though worn once or twice a trifle thin, saw them safe into Sar, where Sir Colvin recognized in Terrington's insulting suspicions of his host the policy which had proved so curiously effective throughout their journey.

Its observed success made him accept more readily the difficulties entailed, especially since Terrington seemed to expect no assistance in removing them.

He set to work upon the Fort with the Bakót levies on the afternoon of his arrival, and began at the same time to organize a system of supply. He was at his desk, or directing alterations in the Fort until a late hour of the evening, eating his dinner with one hand and working with the other, so that he did not meet Rose Chantry till chota hazri next day.

A wing of the Residency had been turned into mess and ante-rooms, and furnished the Commissioner with quarters. Clones, the doctor, found lodging in another part of it, while Terrington, Walcot and Dore, his immediate subordinates, and Langford, who commanded the Sikh and Dogra detachments, made shift in an adjoining bungalow, and the native officers were sheltered by the Fort.

It was still early when Terrington, already half through his morning's work, entered the mess-room; but only Mrs. Chantry remained beside the urn. She wore a brown canvas habit, a hard straw hat, with the colours, scarlet and sage, of her husband's regiment. She looked to him absurdly young and pretty for a woman in such a place; and he was provoked by the folly which permitted her to arrive there. She was trying to look disdainfully indifferent. She was proud of being the one Englishwoman in that utmost post of the Empire, and this man alone had appeared absolutely unconscious of her presence.

"I suppose you're Captain Terrington," she said, turning towards him from the table; "as I was introduced yesterday to all the others?"

"Yes," he smiled, "I'm Nevile Terrington: and it needs no supposing to give a name to you."

"Really?" she said, reseating herself. "I shouldn't have imagined you were aware of my existence."

"All too well!" he sighed, smiling. "There is nothing I would have sooner missed in Sar."

She snapped back the tap of the samovar, and faced him in a pretty little blaze of petulance across the open teapot.

"You would turn me out now if you could, I dare say," she cried.

"This very hour," he assured her, his smile unruffled. "But I can't. 'Rien ne va plus,' as they say at another game. Do you know what that means?"

"At Monte Carlo?"

"No! in Sar? It means winter, I'm afraid."

"Winter!" she exclaimed, her resentment embarrassed by the man's imperturbable temper, and her interest provoked by his voice. "I'm going down with Sir Colvin."

"Yes!" he said. "And when will that be?"

"When he's done here."

"Yes!" he said again, "but that hardly puts a date to it. I can give you one for the snow."

"Look here!" she cried—and the little imperious words, with their little imperious manner, made suddenly a bond of battle between them—"you haven't been here a day, and you've set every one foaming. Do you know that?"

"Yes," he said humbly. "I'm afraid I've put my foot into it all round."

"Well!" she exclaimed. "Do you want me against you too?"

He shook his head gravely.

"Heaven forbid!" he said. "But you're against me already."

She rose, lifted her riding-whip from the table and took her skirt in her hand.

"Yes, I am!" she said.

She moved towards the verandah, visible through the carved screen of wood that filled a part of the wall: stopping before a quaint Cashmiri mirror that hung upon it to set her hat straight and tie her veil.

Terrington's eyes followed her as he stirred his tea.

"Where do you ride?" he asked, as she went towards the door.

She turned in the entrance, facing him, against the crimson folds of the purdah.

"Everywhere," she said.

"You'll have to give it up," he announced tranquilly.

She stood an instant longer, her lithe brown figure framed in the curtains' crimson and gold, to let him realize the defiance under her lowered eyelids and the scorn of her little lifted chin. Then she pushed back the purdah and stepped out into the sun.

III

Whatever regret may have sounded in Terrington's admission, he did nothing to mitigate the inconvenience of the boot he had thrust into Sar.

He reorganized the service of spies which had been of such use to him five years before; but the difficulties in picking up the threads, which had then been complacent to his fingers, taught him more than was told by those on which he could lay his hands.

The rise in the price of treachery, and the trivial details it could profess to furnish, warned him not only of the nearness and wide-spread intimation of an outbreak, but of a native confidence in its success. He had sufficient belief in the extractive qualities of a bribe to expect a few days' notice of the final explosion, when a knowledge of the plot should have reached the more servile of his informants. Meanwhile he could only listen to its developments in the dark.

On the surface there was no sign of trouble, save the difficulty of obtaining audience of the Khan, and his disinclination, when cornered, to talk treaties. There was much futile arrangement and re-arrangement of durbar; Mir Khan refusing to discuss politics anywhere but in the Palace, and Terrington being equally determined to provide them with quite another carpet.

Meanwhile the most amiable appearances were preserved, and polo was played three days a week on the ground beyond the Fort.

Within that gloomy building alterations of a significant kind were in progress, but the only visible addition was a dado in art paper round some of the walls.

The paper had been appropriated, from the medley of gifts collected for the Khan by some humorist at headquarters, by Terrington, who said he had a more pressing use for it.

Chantry, when he discovered that all the pressing was to be done on the mud walls of the Fort, objected petulantly to this curtailment of his stock of presents, which the Khan's policy of postponements had almost exhausted.

Terrington replied drily that the paper was marked 'sanitary,' and that the condition of the Fort when handed over to him was the reverse of that: hence his use of it.

He did not point out further that a stick drawn along the dado in a certain direction would have revealed a series of gaps in the mud work behind it; and that if the point of the stick were used vigorously to sound such gaps a lightly mortared stone would have fallen outwards from each of them, and the Fort become a better ventilated and loop-holed building.

Concealment was so essential to the undertaking that only Sir Colvin, Afzul Singh, Terrington's trusted Subadar, and the sappers who did the work were in the secret. Other noises had to be contrived to cover the daily perforations, and only in darkness could the final drilling of the walls be done: the outmost portion being replaced and the dado extended before dawn.

Sir Colvin did not appreciate these preparations; but he could not condemn them. They meant a winter's defence of Sar Fort against overwhelming odds, and that was not a pretty thing to contemplate.

An uglier one, however, was to face those odds unprepared, and be himself responsible for the improvidence.

So his consent was given, as an insurance on his reputation, but he wished that Terrington's prevision had been more accommodating or less acute.

So far, however, as the Commissioner was forced to admit, they had been justified by results. Nothing had come of the Mission, and nothing seemed to be on its way. More than a month had gone by in Sar, and though the sun still filled its sheltered valley with a summer heat, snow had fallen on the eastern passes; and, visibly from the hills about it, the everlasting whiteness of the northern peaks was spreading in frozen silence towards the plain.

Terrington had watched that whiteness, knowing what it meant, and, half ashamed of himself, hoping what it meant.

It was for the falling of that icy portcullis, he felt, that Sar was waiting: waiting till it closed across their chance of escape, across their hope of rescue.

Then the gathering conspiracy would burst: burst, as it supposed, on unprepared defenders; and the end would rest with him. It would be a siege, whatever its outcome, as great as any that had lived in story, and the man who saw it through would need no further fame.

He was a cavalryman; but this was his ideal of combat: a fight which should test every quality of manhood; a struggle through months of despairing vigilance with unconquerable hordes.

Yet though he saw in such a siege the rare chance of a lifetime, a chance for which his life had waited, he tried with an astounding probity to make it impossible.

"I believe," he told Sir Colvin on the question of secret fortification, "I believe that we can hold Sar Fort for at least ten weeks, if my plans are carried out; but, if I may say it to you, sir, I think we have no business to try."

Asked his reason, he expressed the conviction that the game of military glory in Sar wasn't worth the candle of men's lives which would be burnt in an attempt to relieve it in mid-winter.

"Your word, then, is go?" asked the Commissioner.

"Yes, sir. Make the immediate discussion of the treaty the condition of your remaining, and let the Khan realize how his refusal will be understood.

This place can be wiped out cheaply enough next summer; but if our chaps have to slam up here through the snow they'll lose two men for every one they save."

"And how are we to go?" asked the other.

"Oh; by the Palári," replied the soldier. it "By the Palári!" exclaimed Sir Colvin. "Why the snow's over it already."

"Yes, sir; but Gale is at this end of it in Rashát. What's to happen to him if we creep out by the south?"

But the Commissioner shook his head, to Terrington's intense relief. That last argument clinched his decision. The Government which put him into the pickle must take him out of it. He was not going to fight his way home with three hundred men through the snows of the Palári and between the desolate precipices of Maristan, where once in ancient days an army had melted like the spring water upon its courses. So Terrington returned to his loopholes, and Sir Colvin to that merry little messroom in the shade of the chenar where all the trifling rites of home were observed with such an exacting deference, and the chances of the morrow debated with a boy's disdain. The dinner table, however, could show a feature which would have been unusual elsewhere, since a woman sat in its seat of honour.

When Mrs. Chantry had made over her two best rooms for the use of the Mission, its members had elected her to the presidency of their mess, and despite the charming shyness with which she took the chair she had converted it at once into a throne.

Most of her subjects would have welcomed the wildest folly on her behalf, and not one would have missed without dismay the light whiteness of her presence in the breakfast-room, or the lithe figure with its girlish shoulders which rose every evening from the square black chair at the head of the table and lifted a glass above its golden head to pledge their memories to their Queen. It is possible that, as they touched glasses against the one her white arm held across the cloth, they vowed a more immediate homage than the toast proclaimed; but then a soldier's homage has often so many vicarious shades.

Of Terrington Mrs. Chantry saw far less than of the rest. He made no occasions to meet her, and never offered himself as an escort for the rides which he had not yet proscribed. She saw him at polo—and he was worth seeing at polo—at dinner, and occasionally in the morning, when she was in time to pour out his tea.

For the remainder of the day he was buried in the Fort. But she learnt, chiefly through her husband, the part his counsel played in Sir Colvin's decisions, especially when that was, as mostly, in direct disagreement with Lewis Chantry's mind.

Of that mind his wife had never taken a too imposing measure, but she espoused it now even when obviously at fault.

She used it to provide causes for a quarrel with Nevile Terrington, and she despised it for starting her almost always in the wrong.

She would have been puzzled, perhaps, to give a reason for her enmity, and might have said that it dated from the moment she had seen him. But it had really an earlier origin—the moment when she expected, and did not see him; and it was kept alive by his absolute indifference to her beauty and her opinion.

Her supreme object was to show herself stronger than he, to thwart his plans, to make him repent having dared to ignore her.

For he would not take her seriously enough to explain his intentions. He treated her as a child; as though there were a world of things that could not be put into speech for her. He was for ever filling up spaces, where the matter was beyond her with the asterisks of a smile.

But while he was in Sar her efforts were of no avail.

Terrington could detect her secret influence in the sayings of all the men about her, even in Sir Colvin's tentative suggestions; but beyond creating a dull hostility to his plans and policy she could do nothing.

She tried to draw from him at mess some declaration that would irritate the others, but Terrington, though apparently indifferent to their irritations, only laughed at her attempts.

It was when, by a sudden intermission in the supplies on which he had counted for provisioning the Fort, Terrington was obliged to leave Sar in order to put personal persuasion on his agents in the country round, that Rose Chantry saw her chance, and took it.

The decision she could most effect was, she saw instantly, that of the Durbar.

Every one was chafing under the restrictions which Terrington had imposed; every one was anxious to have the crisis over, and the future settled one way or another. Aire's urgent representations had been shelved by a harassed Viceroy in the fatuous hope of something turning up to save expense and excuse his vacillations.

The eastern passes were already under snow, the southern would be white with it in a fortnight longer. If a winter in Sar were to be avoided something must be done at once, and, since no one but Terrington anticipated hostilities, a winter in Sar was the last thing they wished.

Rose Chantry found, in consequence, ground sown ready to her hand: and she fed it with a fertilizer which is always effective—a woman's smile at man's unvalorous hesitations.

In this case, probably, it only precipitated the harvest; but precipitation was essential.

On the third day of Terrington's absence the Durbar was proclaimed.

IV

The Durbar had been announced only a few hours previous to Terrington's return, but Rose Chantry had had the news of it from her husband on the previous evening.

Consequently, when Nevile, so long before he was expected, entered the ante-room, she was quite at home with her triumph and only surprised by the chance of thrusting it into his face.

When, half ashamed of having harried such a hungry man, she had flown into the mess-room to find food for him, Terrington sat staring at the white chunam walls, softly aglow with the sunlight that blazed outside. A window in one of them framed a space of blue sky, the greenness of a chenar, and, squatted on the ground beneath it, Rose Chantry's ayah, swinging a glass bead tied to the lowest bough. He was too tired to think of the news he had heard, or to keep his thoughts from following the woman who had told it. He realized with a numb surprise how many memories of her remained in the queer glimmer of that empty room. How much he remembered which he thought to have forgotten, and which, he was not too tired to tell himself, he ought to have forgotten.

Whichever way he looked he could see her figure in one of its airy poses, coquettishly sweet or coquettishly defiant; smiling, pouting, mocking, or fancifully grave. The other figures in those groups, men all of them, had faded; hers remained. A white spirit that filled the place for him.

He shut his eyes to shut it out; but found the likeness was on the other side of his lids.

He lifted them quickly at a laugh from the mess-room doorway through which Rose Chantry was leaning, with a tatty in either hand pressed against her shoulders and her golden head in the gap.

"Didn't mean to wake you," she said, smiling, "but there's some cold chikor. Will that do?"

"Nothing better," he replied.

"Well, you'd better have it where you are," she announced with a glance across her shoulder; "they're hanging a new ceiling cloth in here, and there's no end of a litter."

As her head withdrew with a shrill call to the kitmatgah, Sir Colvin and Chantry entered from the verandah.

The Commissioner, with the sense of nakedness which men have felt so often since the days of Eve from following a woman's counsel, wished, on learning of Terrington's arrival, to confront him personally with the news of the Durbar. So after he had seated himself and listened to what could be told him on the prospects of supply, he put the question with an exaggerated imitation of his own bluffness.

"Well! I suppose you've heard of the Durbar?"

"I'm afraid, sir," said the other, "I've been too hungry to hear of anything but breakfast. It's to be cold chikor," he added, smiling, as Rose Chantry, followed by the kitmatgah, made a muslin whiteness in the mess room-door.

She heard the cheerful lie with a flash of admiration for the man who spoke it.

So many beaten men, she knew, would have jumped at the peevish chance to hit back, especially when the hard truth to hit with was in their hands.

"Well," continued Sir Colvin, saluting Mrs. Chantry and reseating himself, as the tray was laid before Terrington, "I decided, as no reply came to my last demand, some sort of move must be made at once, if we weren't to be boxed here all the winter. So, as there was no chance of ferreting the Khan out of that hole of his, we're going to talk him into reason over there."

Terrington, with his knife in the partridge, looked up and nodded.

"I suppose the plan's no more to your mind than ever?" queried the Commissioner.

"No, sir," said his military adviser. "I think it's even less."

"How! from what you've heard?" exclaimed Sir Colvin.

"No," said the soldier slowly; "from what I haven't heard. There's no talk in the hills; and when a Sari man's dumb, he's either got something to say, or something not to say it."

"Hang it all!" cried Chantry. "I wonder if there's anything that you wouldn't think a bad sign?"

Aire shrugged his shoulders.

"Well! the die's cast," he said; "and we've got to see the thing through. The only question left is one of escort. We want to look imposing but not belligerent. What do you think?"

"The smaller the better," said Terrington drily.

"Why?"

"You can't take enough to make it safe for you," explained the other; "but you can take enough to make it unsafe for us."

"For you?" Sir Colvin asked.

"Suppose you don't come back?" was Terrington's reply.

"Gad! but you're a cheerful counsellor," cried Chantry hotly.

"If they murder us, eh," said Aire.

"And you think they mean to, Captain Terrington?" asked Rose Chantry.

Terrington shook his head.

"Not to-morrow!" he said. "Mir Khan wouldn't expect to get the chance."

"You mean he doesn't believe we're such unqualified fools as to go there?" Sir Colvin suggested.

"That's probably how he puts it," said Terrington blandly.

"Well that gives us a chance the more," Chantry threw in.

"A chance the less, I think," said Terrington. "Blood is always a Sari man's first thought, and he'll leave no time for a second."

The agent's dark eyes glowered with a whole-souled malediction, but Sir Colvin, tapping on the table, watched in silence for some seconds while Terrington finished his meal.

"Do you still try to dissuade me?" he asked at length.

"Not at all, sir," replied the other. "I was only thinking of the escort. If they mean murder over there they'll mean it the more the more of you there are."

"Why?"

"Supposing they intend to go for us, they'll wait till all the passes are closed, and we're cut off. In that case they'll hardly give away their game now, unless they get a chance to cripple us."

"Twenty men would be enough?"

"Ample," said Terrington. "And I'd keep as many of them outside as possible."

"Yes; and you might pick some of your own men for the job."

Terrington's face hardened. His men were his children, and he hated to let them run a risk which he could not share.

"In that case I'd ask the honour of going with you, sir," he said.

Sir Colvin shook his head.

"No, no!" he answered. "The Fort is your business, and it may prove a big one. Chantry is going in with me, and Langford, who's an old cavalryman, will take the escort. I've sent down word of what I'm doing, but I'll leave a fuller account with you, in case anything goes wrong." He turned with Chantry to leave the room, calling back from the doorway: "By the way, the polo's to come off to-morrow afternoon as we arranged. You're playing, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir," replied the other, watching the two figures pass out of the verandah, and seem to shrink as they were immersed in the fierce yellow of the sun.

Then he turned, and met Rose Chantry's eyes.

She had flung herself into a long chair: her knees were crossed; her head thrown back; her hands clasped behind it. To Terrington's vision the tip of her toe, her knee and her chin were in a line; and the absurd little sole of her shoe, with its elfin instep and the arch curl of its heel, made a print on his memory in which it was afterwards to tread.

"Well!" she said, with her tantalizing smile, "was the chikor good?"

"Excellent," he answered.

Her lips fluttered like the wings of a bird.

"Didn't it taste of defeat?" she suggested, the dark lids drooping over her eyes.

"No," he said gravely, "it tasted extremely game."

She swept him with her covert glances, but his had fallen to her foot.

"Why did you tell that lie?" she asked presently.

He looked up into her face for an instant.

"I've forgotten," he said.

"Sir Colvin wouldn't have suspected me," she added. "He knows no more about a woman than ... than you do.

"I suppose that leaves him without much knowledge to boast of?" he reflected.

"Yes," she said; "it does."

She tilted her head sideways to see, beyond her knee, on what his eyes were fixed. She tossed her foot clear of the muslin flounces, and then with a curious twist of the ankle brought it round into her view.

"What's wrong with it?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"How should I know?" he said thoughtfully. "It wasn't made for me."

She laughed, slowly twirling her foot, as though fascinated by its suppleness, or by the gleaming creases of the silk that covered it. Then, with a little jerk of her knee, she let it settle again into the froth of flounces.

"Really," she said, "for a man who says so little, you do say the strangest things."

His eyes had wandered again to the square of open air, the picture in azure and ochre and emerald which the window made in the wall. The brown woman still sat swinging her bead in the shade of the chenar. Terrington could see its glassy blueness as it dipped to and fro across a splinter of sunlight.

Rose Chantry, with her eyes on his profile, asked him at what he was looking.

He told her.

"I know!" she exclaimed. "Why is she always doing that?"

"She wants a child," he said.

"But she has one."

"Another then."

She gave a shudder.

"What strange things women are!" she cried.

His eyes came round to her, and she felt a coldness in them like the green gleam of ice.

"Out here, you see," he said quietly, "women are still as fond of making men as of making fools of them."

"Why do you say that?" she asked sharply.

"I could think of nothing better," he replied.

"Why did you say it to me?" she persisted.

"To whom else could I have said it?" he enquired blandly.

The blaze of anger seemed to fill her eyes with a floating sparkle of fresh colours, and her lips closed tightly, as though to repress a desire to bite him. Then she met his glance and laughed.

"I wonder why you dislike me so," she said.

"I don't dislike you," he replied.

"Oh, well!" she sighed, "why don't you dislike me, then; since you seem too? You wish I wasn't here!"

"Very much," he admitted.

"Why? What harm do I do?"

"Haven't you told me that this morning?"

"No!" she cried. "You weren't thinking of that; you know you weren't. You believe that would have happened anyhow. It was what you meant about making fools of men."

"Well," he said, "don't you make fools of them?"

She shook her head softly.

"My mistake then," he said.

"Ah!" she sighed, "but you don't think so. I daresay you think something much more horrid of me than you care to say. And it ought to have been rather nice for you all, having me up here."

"Yes," he said, "I think it ought."

She looked at him doubtfully, crumpling her lips together in her fingers.

"But you do make mistakes," she went on retrospectively.

"Yes," he said, "one makes everything of them."

She regarded him for a moment in the light of the remark, before adding:

"You told me, the first time you saw me, I must give up riding."

"Yes," he admitted, smiling; "that was one of them. But I found that your riding could be of use to us."

"Of use to you?" she exclaimed.

"Yes, in creating a false impression."

"An impression of what?"

"Of security: that we did not think you were in any danger."

"Though you thought I was?"

"I was sure of it," he said.

She was sitting upright now; her hands set upon the chair-arms; her face changing stormily between anger and astonishment.

"You were sure I was in danger, yet you did nothing to prevent it!" she cried. "Do you mean that?"

"What should I have done?" he enquired.

"Warned me!" she said

"But didn't I?"

"Oh, that!" she exclaimed impatiently.

"And would you have been warned?"

"I don't know. I can't say. That's got nothing to do with it. Or you could have given me an escort."

He shook his head.

"That would have made you no safer, and would have spoilt you as an advertisement."

"As an advertisement!" she protested hotly. "Do soldiers let a woman run the risk of being murdered to make things safe far them? I think it's contemptible!"

"Yes," he said quietly; "so I see: but you don't think enough."

He sat looking at her in a way she detested; as no other man seemed able to look at her; as though she were a piece in a game he played.

"Did any one else know it wasn't safe for me?" she demanded.

He shook his head.

"Wouldn't you have been warned in that case?" he suggested.

"Yes," she returned warmly, "I'm quite certain I should."

"I think so too," he said. "Nothing in Sar would have been weighed beside it."

"Except by you," she retorted.

"Except by me," he said. "You see I'm here to weigh things. I'm here to look after you all. You think I should have told you of your danger, and shut you up in the safety of Sar. But there is no safety in Sar. That's the mistake. Your riding was a risk, but it helped our chance to make Sar safer; safer for every one, safer for you."

"And suppose I had been killed?"

"Well," he said, "you can fancy what I should have paid for it. But the safety would have been there, though it was only there for others. And it was to make that that I am here."

She met his musing observation of her with hard clear eyes.

"Haven't you wasted an unusual lot of time talking to me this morning, Captain Terrington?" she said.

He took the deep breath of a man whose heart is sick for sleep, and threw back his shoulders.

"Yes," he smiled, rising; "I was quite exceptionally tired."

V

Terrington gave a practical shape to his forebodings as soon as the Commissioner and his escort started for the Durbar.

The entire force was under arms; the Residency guard was trebled; sappers were stationed in every room to break open the loopholes; others waited with discs of guncotton to blow away the trees which masked the polo ground; and the final connexions were made with the mine which was to overthrow the courtyard wall.

Appearances were kept up by an attenuated fatigue party, which was as markedly visible about the place as the rest of the garrison was not.

Terrington, who had changed for polo, also made a peacefully indifferent figure as he strolled across to the mess-room and round the Residency garden, with a loose coat drawn over his riding-shirt, whose blue and silver showed in the scarf about his throat.

He had returned to his orderly-room in the Fort, when news of the tragedy which was to wring from England a growl of vengeance was brought to the sentries at the Residency gate by the handful of blood-smeared horsemen who swept through it with broken and clotted lances and a crimson lather on their horses' flanks.

Hussain Shah was holding Langford, mortally hurt, in the saddle, his huge figure swinging limply to and fro, and more than half that remnant of the escort reeled as they drew rein before the Residency door.

Terrington was not the first to hear of the disaster, but he heard it in the most dramatic fashion; from Mrs. Chantry's lips.

She had torn across the compound as the Lancers came to a blundering halt before the mess-room entrance, and dashed breathless into the orderly room, waiting no confirmation of the story that was told by their plight.

She caught at her side, clutching with the other hand at the table, and for an instant panted, speechless, her face white as jasmine, above a big bow of creamy lace.

Then, with a hard gasp of breath:

"They're killed!" she cried.

Terrington had sprung to his feet as she burst in upon him.

"Who are?" he demanded.

"Lewis and Sir Colvin," she panted, "and ... and most of the others. All but six or seven of them. Mr. Langford's there, but he's simply hacked; and all the men are streaming."

A long thin wail broke from her with the horror of what she had seen, and she covered her eyes with both her hands.

Terrington had stepped towards the doorway as he realized the significance of what she had seen. She put herself sharply in front of him, her head flung fiercely back.

"What are you going to do?" she demanded. "You let them go like that, you made them go like that! That's what's done it all! You wouldn't let them take the men! Aren't you going to try to save them? They mayn't be dead! Don't you think they mayn't be dead? If only you'll go at once; this moment! Take every one and smash them. Don't you think it's possible; just possible? And it wasn't I who did it, was it? was it really?"

He laid a hand upon her shoulder to put her aside.

"No, child," he said gently; "you had nothing to do with it."

As he would have passed out, leaping footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Captain Walcot almost dashed into his arms.

"Have you heard?" he cried.

"What?" asked Terrington

Walcot glanced with deprecation at Mrs. Chantry's figure.

"Say what you know!" said Terrington.

"Sir Colvin and Chantry have been murdered at the Durbar, and all the men they took in with them."

"Who told you?" said Terrington.

"Hussain Shah," replied the other excitedly. "Langford was in the courtyard with half the escort, when a yelling began inside the hall, and a swarm of those brown swine poured out shouting that Sir Colvin was killed, and attacked him. Langford charged, and tried to jam them in the doorway; but the crowd joined in behind, and when Langford was shot through the body Hussain retired 'em, and they had to cut their way through till they were clear of the Bazaar. Every man of them was wounded, and they've lost five and Langford's dying."

"Is Clones with him?"

Walcot nodded.

Terrington remained a moment without speaking, gazing almost absently through the window in the thick mud wall at the green grove of chenar. In his loose racing-coat above polo boots and breeches, and with the gay silk scarf at his throat, he suggested anything but a man suddenly met by a great emergency.

"Tell Subadar Afzul Singh," he said slowly, "to post the Fort guard, break out the loopholes and put the place at once in a state of defence. You will parade every other available man in the courtyard within half an hour, in marching order a hundred and fifty rounds a man. Dore will take over Langford's Sikhs and Dogras; the Bakót levies will reinforce the Fort guard. Send Risaldar Hussain Shah to me here."

Rose Chantry held her sobbing breath in astonishment at the note of control which had come into the man's voice. It was lower and softer than she had ever heard it, but it spoke with a quiet and assured authority which seemed to master her even while it addressed another.

Walcot felt it too. He was the elder of the two men, and but a few months junior in the service; they had lived together for some time on terms of perfect equality, yet now, though Terrington had made no reference to a change in their relations, Walcot's heels came together while the other was speaking, and his hand went to his cap with a "Very good, sir" as Nevile ended.

The phrase, the sudden change of relation, Walcot's retreating figure, disciplined and subordinate, produced on Rose Chantry a very curious effect.

"Are you going to take over the command?" she said to Terrington, who had seated himself at his desk and was writing rapidly.

He turned his head and looked at her, his mind evidently occupied with an interrupted thought.

"I have taken it over," he said quietly, turning again to his pen.

She watched him for a moment. His silence, his unconcern, his power, were all alike beyond her.

"Are you going to the Palace?" she asked at length.

He looked round at her again, as clearly preoccupied as before, but without irritation.

"You will save them, won't you, if you can?" she went on imploringly, to force the subject into his mind.

"Yes," he said slowly, "I'm going to the Palace." Then after a pause, but with his eyes still upon her, "Mr. Clones would probably be very glad of some help with the wounded."

"The wounded!" she repeated with a little shudder.

"Yes," he said; "you'll see a good deal of them during the next few days, and it's as well to be of use. If you'll take this to him," he went on, folding up a note, "he'll show you what to do. It's only the making up of bandages," he continued, as she held back; "the time left us is very short."

Something scornful had come into his voice, though ever so faintly, and something compelling as well. She took the note when he held it out to her, unable, despite her will, to do anything else. As she passed the doorway Hussain Shah appeared on the landing beyond it, the folds of the turban above his temple stiff with blood. She paused an instant to hear Terrington's greeting, but the greeting was in Pukhtu, which she did not understand. Had she understood, her opinion of Terrington's hardness would have been confirmed, for no reference was made to the wounded man's condition until he had received his orders.

"Are you fit for duty?" said Terrington simply.

"I am unhurt, sir," replied the other as he saluted.

Half an hour later every available man in the force was paraded in the courtyard of the Fort. Walcot with his Lancers in front; then, behind Terrington, the Sikhs and Dogras that could be spared from the Fort, the Guides bringing up the rear. The Maxim had been hoisted on to the roof of the Eastern Tower, whence it covered for a certain distance an advance on the Palace. In the silence the blow of a pick could be heard, and the falling stones from the last loopholes in the walls.

Terrington sat his horse immovably, waiting for the signal from Afzul Singh which should open the gates. He was burning with a dull anger against the circumstance in which he had been placed, and against the folly of the men who had created it. He knew that in marching on the Palace to demand the men who had entered it that morning he was imperilling the safety of his entire force; yet he knew, too, that sentimental England would never forgive his sanity in declining the risk should any of Sir Colvin's party happen to be still alive. He had no hope of their safety. He was too well acquainted with the temper in which they had been attacked. That he viewed with no resentment whatever. It had been a piece of the foulest treachery, but treachery was a virtue in Sar, and he was quite able to accept, and even to respect, alien standards of conduct.

What did anger him was the stolid British arrogance which declined to make allowance for any prejudices but its own, and thought beneath its dignity all considerations which were not in the terms of its own intelligence. Rose Chantry watched him from the orderly-room window which overlooked the courtyard. She had been in the surgery helping Clones to make up first-aid bandages, but the tramp of laden men down the long passages, and the roll, like a soft volley, of grounded butts in the dust as the men fell in, so wrought on her excitement that she left her work and ran up the narrow twisted stairs to the room from which half an hour earlier Terrington had sent her.

She watched him now, with her shoulder pressed against the yellow chunam wall and her head drawn back in order not to be seen, wondering how a man of his dominant authority could wait impassively at such a moment the arrangements of a subordinate.

Her eyes, dry and hot, seemed almost to repudiate resentfully the tears which she had shed; a pulse throbbed like the flutter of a moth at her throat; her uneasy fingers seemed to crave to be closed, and yet when she clenched her fist they ached to be opened. She longed to tear about, to give orders, to rouse enthusiasm. She would have liked to ride beside Terrington to the Palace and carry a flag: and the thought of how he would regard such a proposal moved her not to a sense of its humour but to renewed irritation with the man who could ride as indifferently to death as he would to a dinner.

Her whole being was in disorder owing to the uncertainty of her husband's fate. At the first shock and accepted inference of his death tears had burst from her in the weak wretchedness of bereavement, the sense of widowhood, and grief at the dying of one so near to her in the pride of his youth. It was perhaps the very nearness of death's-knife, the cutting off of the one who was one with her, who had scarcely gone from her arms, which gave her the keenest shudder. The sword which had been thrust through him seemed almost to have pricked her breast. Not that she feared for her own safety; she never imagined that it was compromised. She had the supreme British scorn for her country's foes, and thought it was only a question of policy whether Terrington with his handful of men would not at once burn the Palace to the ground, carry off the Khan in chains, and ravage the whole country with sword and fire.

It was death in the shadow which had stabbed and was gone which made her shiver. A thing so swift, so sudden, so unforeseen mocked the comfortable security of life.

But with the fitting out of the expedition and speculation on the possible safety of those in the Palace, her emotions became dreadfully perplexed. She had perforce to cease mourning a husband who might be still alive, and with the disappearance of a reason for her sorrow she began to wonder what had caused it.

Had she cried because she loved him or because he was killed? She had not a doubt while she thought him dead, but the chance of his being alive seemed to have altered everything. Last night she would have disowned indignantly the idea that she did not love him. She had accepted him as naturally in the order of needful things as food and clothing. He was her husband and so had everything that husbands have, did everything that husbands do. She had never thought about it as a personal matter. One had a husband as one had a cold in the head; one didn't always quite know why; but having him one accepted him for the sort of thing he was.

Lewis had taken her from a life already wearily dull, and with every prospect of becoming duller. He had come suddenly into her existence—a quite unlooked-for excitement; and had transplanted her into surroundings more exciting still; full of men, and dangers, and pageants and great affairs. It was so full indeed, that in the press of things to do he was a good deal crowded out. His work, his fresh appointments—for he had been tremendously in demand—gave him rather the air of continually arranging new scenes and effects in which she played the leading lady.

She didn't in the least so consciously regard him; she had not even noticed how much his work kept him out of the occasions which she most enjoyed; he seemed just a part of the delightful movement, a sort of dashing high-spirited hot-tempered ambitious concentration of it all. He was the man who had made it all possible for her, being her husband. That was how, gratefully, she most often thought of him.

His death wrenched her by its treacherous horror; but it had put no awkward questions. The questions came with the doubt if he were dead. How much did she care for him? Did she care for him at all? Had she ever cared for him as a husband? Right on the heels of that, answering it to her astounded perception, came a shrinking of disgust that she had lived three years with a man as his wife without loving him; without even discovering that she did not love him. It was that which seared the tears in her eyes, and left her with a sense of shame and self-disdain and loneliness indescribable.

It was that too in a curious reflected fashion which increased her anger at Terrington's quiet indifference to the ways of Fate. She could picture Lewis Chantry's raging vehemence under a like provocation.

As she watched the silent mass of men in the courtyard—the dull yellow of the field-service kit lightened by the gay alkalaks of the Lancers, the orange and white of their pennons, the glistening of the sun upon lance-head and bayonet, the silence broken only by the clink of a bridoon as some impatient horse flung up its head—there was a burst of blue and red above the eastern tower and the Union Jack flew out above the Fort.

It was the signal that Afzul Singh had completed his defences. Walcot rode back to Terrington and saluted. Terrington nodded. With a sparkle of light on their lances, the horsemen were in the saddle, the rifles leapt to the 'carry,' and were swung on to the shoulder, cresting the infantry with the shimmer of steel; the gates were thrown open, the Lancers passed through and extended, the Sikhs and Dogras wheeled outwards after them in column of fours, followed by the Guides.

As the gates closed behind the last section a sharp explosion rang out, followed by others in quick succession.

Rose Chantry started and stood quivering in tense excitement; then darted across the room to the further window, which looked towards the polo ground through a green fringe of chenar.

As she reached it there was another rending uproar almost under her feet, and a tree leapt into the air from beneath the window and fell with a crashing ruin of its branches towards the river.

Afzul Singh was converting the screen of chenar into an abattis with discs of gun cotton, but to Rose the trees seemed to be falling before the enemy's shells, and she ran hurriedly to the eastern tower to get a view of the besiegers, and found there Afzul Singh himself, who explained her mistake.

A sand-bag revetment crowned the top of the tower, and the loopholes on either side of the Maxim were manned by picked shots. All were intently watching the occasional glimpse of colour or gleam of steel which marked the progress of Terrington's force through the Bazaar.

Now that the din of the detonations had ceased not a sound broke the silence; the city lay listless and without a sign of life in the haze of its noontide heat. The dust rose on the heels of the column as it emerged from the Bazaar and filtered through the collection of low mud buildings beyond it. Clear of these, Terrington swung his right at once on to the river, and the whole of his little force could be seen for the first time as it extended and moved forward across the space of open ground to the east of the Palace. It looked painfully small for its job, like an ant attacking a mouse, even though Terrington made it as imposing as he could without sacrificing its compactness. The ground, flat as a floor from the river to the foot-hills, gave no command for rifle fire over the centre of the town, and Terrington had no choice but to march straight at the wall which surrounded the Khan's buildings, and chance their being defended. It was a dangerous piece of work, and Afzul Singh never lowered his glasses till the doubtful part of it was done.

But Terrington showed at once the temper in which he had undertaken it. His cavalry wheeled to the left, leaving the front open, and, advancing, formed a screen which covered the skirts of the town. The river protected the other flank, and, with the Guides in the centre as reserve, the Sikhs went straight for the eastern gate, while the Dogra detachment advanced half right upon the Palace stables where the wall ran down to the river. The guards on the gate allowed themselves to be taken, the stables were occupied without resistance, and a command was thus obtained of the Palace compound which was seen to be invitingly empty. But Terrington was the last man to be tempted by such an invitation. He had obtained a foothold from which to enforce his demands, and did not intend to go a step further.

He could not hope to carry the Palace, filled as it doubtless was with the Khan's guards; he had no guns to batter it; but he could now, if his hand was forced, make life very uncomfortable for those within its walls. So he began to parley.

What passed was hidden by the Palace wall from the watchers on the tower, but after three hours of apprehension they could see that the force was preparing to retire, and presently some of the Khan's bearers appeared through the gateway carrying charpoys. Afzul Singh guessed what was on them, and his grave consideration made no disguise with Mrs. Chantry. He had no hope that any of those who had been trapped in the Palace would return alive, and he held out none to her.

"None come," he said, lowering his glasses; "they are all carried."

Terrington had requested the return of Sir Colvin and his escort, and, on the reply that they were killed, had demanded their bodies.

Mir Khan, informed by his spies that the Fort had been loop-holed, provisions stored, the trees levelled and every preparation made for a prolonged siege, foresaw with a chuckle the very imminent destruction of the British force in Sar, and was far too astute to hurry a game which was going his own way.

So he tendered the bodies with every mark of respect and the most profound apologies for the passions of his subjects which he had been unable to keep under control.

Terrington had replied acknowledging the arrival of the charpoys and announcing that he was for the present the British representative in Sar, and would, on receiving instructions from his Government, acquaint the Khan what reparation was demanded for the murder at a friendly Durbar of Her Majesty's Commissioner.

The old man, when the message was read to him, rubbed his foot and smiled with child-like craftiness. He admired the daring which had flung that handful of the Sirkar's men without an hour's hesitation against his Palace; admired it the more since it seemed to prove that Terrington was after all but a swine-headed fighter like the rest of his kind.

VI

Terrington brought back his men with an undiminished precaution, Mir Khan's affability merely increasing his distrust, and Afzul Singh, his equal in subtlety and in knowledge of the foe, had prepared a sally should the force require assistance in getting out of the Bazaar. Mir Khan, however, to his own everlasting regret, held his hand, so that the little expedition returned without a shot fired, and the gates of the Fort were shut and barred behind it. Afzul Singh had been already entrusted with the duty of putting every alien out of the Fort, but to prevent more securely the escape of information, the guards were strengthened, and sentries patrolled the entire front of the Fort with orders to shoot any man attempting to enter or leave it before dawn.

When the men were dismissed Terrington called Walcot and Dore into the women's durbar hall and sent for Hussain Shah and Afzul Singh, who were the two senior native officers.

"I should like to break the news to Mrs. Chantry if I may," said Walcot in the doorway.

"The news?" enquired Terrington.

"Of her husband's death," Walcot explained.

Terrington's face showed a certain blankness of apprehension. He had forgotten that there was any one in the Fort, whose hopes or fears could be affected by the confirmation obtained of that morning's tragedy.

"Oh, certainly," he said.

The room was a long gloomy one on the ground floor, used by Langford partly as an office, partly as a store. Bales and boxes still filled two of its corners, and the space in front of them was littered with Sir Colvin's and the Chantrys' belongings, which were being removed from the Residency with ostentation. One dark window in the further wall lent what dim light the room had, and the table at which Terrington seated himself was drawn somewhat towards it.

He was writing when the two native officers entered, and he assigned to them the two seats on his right, with the grave silent courtesy with which the East had coloured so curiously his English manner. Dore, nervously tired by the excitement of the morning, had dropped limply on to a bale of clothing, and lit a cigarette, but the two Sikhs sat erect and impassive beside the table. Clones came in to requisition some stores, and reported Langford to be insensible and sinking.

"If you can spare a few moments you might spend them here," said Terrington.

The doctor nodded, and sat down on a packing-case beside Dore, rising again at once as Mrs. Chantry, followed by Walcot, entered the room.

She was wearing still the frock of creamy lace in which she was to have watched the polo that afternoon. Her face looked listless and white and faded above it like a broken flower. Her eyes sought Terrington's in the dim room with a sort of frightened submissiveness.

"May I come in?" she said.

"Of course," he answered, getting out of his chair to hand it to her; but Walcot had already drawn forward a seat of Sari rush from the relics of the Residency, and she dropped into it limply, with a nod of acknowledgment to Terrington, amid all the crushed and huddled fragments of her own lost little home. Walcot sat down on a box beside her. A tiny jade god slid down the pile of rugs and bowls and cushions, and lay at her feet with a severed arm. He had been for years the very dearest of her household treasures, and now to find him maimed and friendless moved in her a despondent misery which she had not felt at her husband's death. She hid the little broken body in the hollow of her hand, and sat there, her head bent over it, shaking with sobs. It was the very smallness of the grief that brought her tears.

Terrington blotted the notes he had written and laid down his pen. He made no sort of preamble: for anything in his manner the occasion might have been the most ordinary in the world.

"I wish," he said, "to explain my plans. Some of us may not come through the next few weeks, and I don't want those who do to be saddled with my mistakes. So I'll enter any protest, to cover you in case I'm not with you at the finish. We leave Sar to-night."

Even the two dark impassive faces on his right reflected the unexpectedness of his announcement, and Walcot half rose to his feet.

"Abandon the Fort?" he exclaimed.

"Abandon the Fort, and everything we cannot carry, and retire by the Palári upon Rashát," said Terrington quietly.

"But I understood, if you'll excuse me," continued Walcot, trying to control his excitement, "that all the defences of the Fort which we've been at for the last month were your idea."

"They were," said Terrington.

"Have you changed your mind then?" asked the other sharply.

"No," said Terrington slowly, "but I've changed my position. I've only so far had to decide how to make the Fort defensible if it had to be defended."

"Yes, but!" Walcot objected, "the clearing of the Residency, the blowing down of these trees; all that has taken place since! What's been the object of that if you didn't mean to stay?"

"In war," said Terrington quietly, "it's sometimes as well to keep your intentions from the enemy."

"Did Sir Colvin mean us to stay here, sir?" enquired Dore.

"Yes," said Terrington. "Sir Colvin intended to hold out in Sar if anything went wrong till a relieving force could get up here from Sampur."

"You absolutely disagree with him, then?" Walcot rapped out.

Terrington looked at him thoughtfully.

"I have another point of view," he said.

"And what's that?" snapped the other.

"He was a political officer and I am a soldier," said Terrington simply.

Dore turned his shoulder upon Walcot, with a wrinkle of annoyance at his carping note.

"Don't you think we could hold Sar, sir?" he asked with boyish eagerness for a stand-up fight.

"Yes," said Terrington, kindling sympathetically at the thought of the fight he too had longed for, "I think we just could, though it might be a near thing. I've decided to clear out," he went on, addressing the others, "because the value of being penned up here doesn't impress me politically, and because digging us out of this in mid-winter would mean a horrible waste of life. There are only a few hundred of us to be wiped out at the worst, but it might take thousands of the men who came to save us. These little sieges are often very costly things."

"I shouldn't think our retirement will be very popular at home," Clones suggested.

"I don't suppose it will," said Terrington; "at home they're rather fond of a siege; it makes the paper more interesting."

"And how about the intentions of the Government, Colonel," Clones continued in his reasonable way; "I suppose you were sent up here to carry them out."

"No doubt," said Terrington with his grave smile, "but without being told what its intentions were. Consequently one rather seems to be here to make intentions for the Government, and I'm very possibly making them all wrong. But that's their fault for not having sent a better man."

"There's one point, Terrington, you don't seem to have considered," Walcot interjected; "that you've got to take a woman over passes which even the natives won't cross at this time of year."

"I haven't considered it for a moment," said Terrington shortly.

Walcot's face curdled with anger.

"That's hardly been the habit of Englishmen hitherto out here," he exclaimed.

"I dare say not," said Terrington with dry indifference.

Rose Chantry, with her hand still closed about the little broken god in her lap, looked up at him through the tears that hung across her eyes. Beyond the cool darkness of the entrance door, against the far wall of the blazing courtyard she could see the row of charpoys with their burden of dead men, mere rolls of sallow dungari cloth, waiting till the grave being dug beside the Residency gate should be wide enough to hold them. It was the most dreadful moment of her life, when she needed above all to be petted and comforted into a sense of her importance, but the man who should have done it was indifferent even to her safety. She had already begun to cheer herself with the thought of a siege; the delicacy of her position; the solicitous homage of all the men; her cheerful and inspiring effect upon them; the excitement in England so intensified by the presence of a woman among the besieged; the accounts of her in the papers, made more touching by her loss; and then the thrill of the relief—she took the relief for granted—the sound of the guns, the fight through the streets of Sar, the cheers of the British troops, the ardent congratulations, the soft abandonment of that moment at the end of the suspense, and herself the one woman in a British army. And the coming home after such an experience; the woman of the moment, every one wanting to meet her; perhaps a command from the Queen.

All her dream was shattered by Terrington's implacable decree. She looked at him with despairing hate. She thought of the reckless sacrifices Englishmen had made for women during the Mutiny, and hated him the more. She felt sure that she could never live through the snows of those passes about which she had heard such awful stories. The cold would kill her; the cold always shrivelled her up; and she had nothing to wear, nothing warmer than was wanted for an Indian winter.

And that very morning, only a few hours back, as the party started for the Durbar, she had exulted in her triumph over him, she whose folly had given everything into his hand!

What ages it seemed since Lewis had swung buoyantly into his saddle, and Sir Colvin, ruddy and cheery, had waved her an "au revoir." Now they were rolls of yellow dungari lying out there in the sun.

In her absorption of self-pity she scarcely heard Captain Walcot's expressions of dissent from his leader's plans, which were more forcible than soldierly. He was seething with wrath at Terrington's treatment of her, and Terrington, aware of his excitement, but quite at fault as to its cause, heard him with determined patience.

"And by which pass do you mean to retire?" he exclaimed at last, unable to shake Terrington's resolve.

"By the Palári," said the other.

"The Palári!" cried Walcot derisively. "Why, it's the worst pass on this side of the Pamir. May I ask why you've chosen it?"

"Have you been through the Palári or Darai?" Terrington enquired.

"No."

"Then you can hardly appreciate why I've chosen it," said Terrington quietly. "The Palári is the only one which we've a chance of reaching without being cut off; it's the only one not commanded from above at this time of year, and Freddy Gale, holding this end of it at Rashát, is absolutely done for unless we dig him out."

His reasons were listened to by the room in absorbing silence. Then Walcot blurted out:

"Is this a council of war?"

"No," said Terrington; "it's an opportunity for protest. I wished to put your advice on record, but I didn't propose to take it."

Walcot thereupon declared himself emphatically in favour of remaining in Sar; Dore followed him less assertively. Clones gave a shrug of his shoulders.

"It's all one to me where I doctor you," he smiled.

Terrington turned to the two men beside him, who had sat, immovably attentive, throughout the discussion.

"We are as the print of thy footsteps," said Afzul Shah, and Hussain nodded.

Terrington wrote for some moments, then read aloud his own dispositions and the objections which had been urged against retirement. His own plans and reasons were very bluntly outlined, but he gave the case for the occupation of Sar with a fulness and cogency that astonished its advocates, who did not suspect how dear the scheme had been to his ambition, nor what its abandonment had cost him.

He handed the paper to Walcot.

"Will you sign it?" he said.

The best that was in the other man responded instinctively to such treatment:

"You've put it a long way stronger than I could myself," he said, taking up the pen.

VII

Langford came back to consciousness an hour before he died, and Terrington sat beside him to the end, writing instructions to cover every detail of the departure while he spoke and listened to the dying man. Langford was a fine horseman and a very capable soldier, and the only one of his subordinates on whose decision Terrington could rely. He had left in India an uncompleted love affair but he spoke of nothing in his last moments but the safety of the force.

"You'll have to watch those Bakót chaps," he murmured, "there's no fight in 'em." And again with more difficulty. "Those beggars 'll cut you off at the Sorágh Gul; get round by the Bewal road. You'll have to smash 'em there." His mind was evidently away with the retreating troops. His grip tightened on Terrington's hand. "If only I could go along with you, old man. Oh, it's hard to come to grief at the first hurdle."

He shut his eyes with that inconsolable sigh, and it was his unconscious soul that whispered, "Give my love to Helen," with the last beats of his heart.

Terrington went on writing as Langford's head fell back, then he loosened the dead man's fingers from his hand, and left the room. The sheer pressure of thought seemed to have squeezed out of him the power of feeling.

In the women's durbar hall he found Walcot and Mrs. Chantry turning over the litter of the Residency rooms.

Terrington had left the porterage of the reserve ammunition to Walcot's arrangement, and had been expecting his report for half an hour. Walcot had, however, considered the packing of Mrs. Chantry's boxes of more importance.

The expression of Terrington's opinion on his preference was a good deal tempered by Mrs. Chantry's presence; but even so was caustic enough to burn itself into Walcot's memory.

As he left the hall without a word, Rose Chantry lifted an Afghan poshteen from the heap beside her.

"Did you send me this?" she asked.

It was lined with astrachan, and exquisitely embroidered, and was the most valuable of Terrington's few possessions.

"Yes," he said, "it was the only warm thing I could get for you. You will want everything you can wear, and you can put that on over a good deal. There are some boots to come."

She did not know that he had sent her the thing of which he had most need himself, and his giving had about it no air of gallantry; but the proof that he had thought of her at a moment when he had to think of everything touched her far more than had Walcot's voluble commiseration.

She held out her hand to him and tried to speak, but her throat closed and her lips trembled.

He took her hand in both of his.

"Poor, poor thing!" he said.

Gholam Muhammed entered with the long lamb-lined boots at that moment and laid them with a salaam in front of her.

They had been made for Terrington and were long enough to reach to a man's knee, and Rose, whose every breath at the moment compromised with a sob, thrust out her pretty foot beside them with unconscious coquetry.

"Oh, that's all right," said Terrington, smiling; "they'll go over the others. You'll not find them a bit too big."

He lifted one, with its tassels and showy crimson calf, and, taking her wrist as if she had been a child, thrust her hand down through the woolly lining which almost filled the top.

The loose sleeve slid back to her elbow against the leather edge, and as she looked into his face with a surprised compliance, something in the softness of the curling silken warmth against her skin touched her suddenly beyond her power of control. She snatched her arm away from him, and, flinging herself upon the heap of curtains and cushions, burst into tears.

Terrington, completely at fault, made no attempt to console her. He knew when to leave a man unhindered and to give a horse its head, and the instinct helped him with a woman's tears. He stood watching her sobbing shoulders, and the shadows on her golden hair, but his thoughts, the instant they were freed from her, flew forward to the forcing of the Sorágh Gul, the double-headed defile on the road to Rashát, where he knew Mir Khan could intercept him and compel him to face an attack from three sides at once. He tried to compel his memory to yield some details of the position which he might turn to account, for his own field-sketches only supplied features which would be useful to the enemy.

The sinking of Rose Chantry's sobs brought his mind back to the dim hall. He put his hand gently on her shoulder.

"What was it, child?" he said.

She raised her head from the crimson silk, leaning towards him against his hand, and mopping her eyes with the ghost of a handkerchief.

"It was the fur," she sobbed; "it felt so soft."

The explanation explained nothing to Terrington—a woman never seemed so unreasonable to him as when she gave her reasons—but its incomprehensibility absolved him from attempted consolation.

"Well," he smiled, "you mustn't cry again till you're across the border. Hukm hai!"

She looked up at him, leaning still against his hand.

"I'm afraid of your orders," she said shyly.

"Well, there's another," he went on with his paternal air; "you must wear everything warm you've got and pack only what you can put on later."

"I've nothing warm," she said with half a sob.

"Oh, come!" he rallied her; "then I'll have to send round the men who are padding your doolie to pad you too! How about that shooting suit of yours?"

His remembrance of it pleased her far more than her possession.

"It's not very warm," she murmured.

"Well, it's a good deal warmer than these flimsy things," he said, lifting the laces that lay round her neck; "and we'll turn a feather quilt into a petticoat for you, cut you a boa out of the mess-room bearskin, and put the poshteen on top of all. Mind, you'll have to parade in full marching order, or we'll leave you behind for Mir Khan to take care of."

An orderly entering with a chit at that moment made an end to the boyish talk that was meant to put fresh heart into her, and Terrington, after a glance at the scrap of paper, left her at once with a smile and a nod and an instant's tightening of his fingers upon her shoulder.

At sunset he read the sentences of the burial service over the trench beside the Residency in which the bodies of the three Englishmen were laid. The dusk was spreading under the autumn twilight, while the pale spaces of eternal snow beyond Rashát were veiled with rose in the clear heaven above the purple ramparts of the valley and the flames of the pyres on which the dead Hindus were burned blazed in clear spires of light through the increasing gloom.

Rose Chantry stood next to Terrington, in a shooting costume of golden-brown tweed, with a leather hunting-belt, a broad band of leather about the short skirt, brown leather boots that laced half way to the knee, and a brown tam-o'-shanter pinned tight upon her curls. She hardly knew what he was reading as she looked across the miles of evening to the tinted snows, and heard the crackle of the funeral fires on either side of her. Life had been suddenly changed altogether into something hard and glaring and stale and ugly like a ball-room opened to the dawn, and she felt to be growing hard and plain and matter of fact to match it.

The melancholy volleys were fired above the grave, the level flash of orange light splitting the darkness like the sweep of a sword, for Terrington, well aware that he was watched, would omit nothing which might by its absence suggest a desire for concealment. While the ostentation of the funeral was distracting the attention of Mir Khan's spies, all the outward openings in the walls were being closed, so that when the funeral party returned to the Fort the arrangements for immediate departure could be pushed forward with continued speed and in complete concealment. The twinkle of lanterns everywhere made the labyrinth of the old mud walls look as if invaded by a flight of fire-flies. In ordered lines across the courtyard the bearers squatted, brown and impassive, beside their burdens; line after line, hour after hour, filing forth from the dark doorways of the Fort, till half the space between its walls was full. The other half was covered with accoutrements and bristled with piled arms. In the stables the Lancers were removing every needless detail from their equipment, and a wisp of rag was twisted round any piece of metal from which a sound might be shaken. In the long gully between the stable and the Fort stood strings of mules with a few zabus, snorting and shuffling under the loads that were being heaped upon their backs.

An hour after midnight the gate of the courtyard was thrown open, and a dark stream of horsemen poured silently out and turned north-east towards the river. They had left their lances broken behind them, but took every ounce of food that they could carry and three hundred rounds a man. Hard on the dust of their hoofs followed the Sikhs and Bakót levies under Dore; the Sikhs, long and lithe, fine marchers and good fighters all of them; the Bakót men short and square, very doubtful shooters and untried in fight, but hard hill-men, at home in the snow, and equal to almost any labour. After them came the long lines of mules out of the gully snorting and shaking their packs and harness, and kicking up more dust than the horsemen. Rose Chantry's doolie followed in rear of these. It had been padded for her with quilts of Armak wool and lined with camel's hair curtains fastened down to keep out the wind, and carried a mattress of feathers, a span in depth, to save her from the joltings of the road. Terrington had literally sketched its construction with one hand while he wrote a despatch with the other, and had himself gone down to the yard to explain away the carpenter's difficulties. But he shook his head at the boxes in which Rose had packed what she considered "absolutely necessary."

"No good!" he said. "Even if we got them to the Palári, we'd have to leave them in the snow."

"How many bearers have I?" Rose demanded.

He looked down at her smiling.

"Four for the doolie and a mule for your baggage," he said; "about what's allowed for half a company. And there's a tent for you on the mule already."

"I can have some one else's tent," she exclaimed crossly.

"No one else has a tent," he said with the same dry smile.

She turned from him petulantly.

"You can leave them all behind if you like; I don't care!"

Yet she repacked submissively—with the help of the khansamah, whom Terrington sent to the assistance of her pride—what she most needed in the space allowed her; with a new dull kindling of anger against the man who could compel her so easily to obey. But the eager preparations in the darkness subdued her with the sense of an impending fate, the silent streaming forth of the little force into the night towards the day of battle and the awful snows, and she was gratefully reassured when Terrington suddenly appeared beside her as the doolie drew up, and helped her in with a comforting pressure of the hand.

"Sleep if you can," he said; "we're perfectly safe for the next twelve hours."

His own beloved Guides brought up the rear, and he rode last with them out of the Fort.

For the next day and night danger only could threaten from direct pursuit, and so his place was for the present with the rear-guard.

VIII

The position in which Terrington found himself requires to be explained.

Determined to clear out of Sar, three ways lay before him. The valley of the Kotli to the south, through the Gate of the Great Evil, by which, with Sir Colvin Aire, he had come up from Sampur; the Darai Pass, due east across the Kalawari, and then south-east into the Punjab; and the Palári, north-east, through the wild welter of ranges under the roof of the world and over plains of snow to the western border of Cashmir.

The first, though physically far the easiest, was out of the question, since the road would be lined with hostile khels who could force him to fight every mile of the way, with the odds of the ground and numbers always against him.

The Darai, which came next in feasibility, was approached over an open and exposed country, and was commanded from above in its most dangerous defiles. Consequently it was by the Palári, the most arduous of all the roads between Sar and Hindustan, that Terrington determined to retire.

To Rashát, which Gale was holding at the foot of the Palári, there were two roads from Sar. One, the longer, which Terrington had taken, led up the left bank of the river through gorges of increasing grandeur till the Sorágh Gul was reached. There the shorter road from Sar joined it, and the two rose together to the snows. Terrington was forced to go the longer way because he could cover his retreat along it with a small rear-guard, and because the shorter passed through Sar itself and beside the very gates of the Palace; but he had to face the certainty of finding Mir Khan and his men at Sorágh Gul in a position almost impregnable barring his advance upon Rashát. There, if wedged between the force in front of him and that following him from Sar, he would be forced to starve or to surrender.

The six hundred men under him were too few to be used offensively; he could not squander them against odds in the open. If compelled to fight his way across the Sorágh Gul not many of that six hundred would find shelter in Rashát. By craft alone could he hope to reach the Palári with the foe behind him, and the craft that should deceive Mir Khan would have to be greatly daring. Greatly daring it was. He divided his force into three parts. The first, composed entirely of the Guides Cavalry Bengal Lancers, was to push on by forced marches to the further side of the double-headed valley which ended in the Sorágh Gul. Being mounted, on a fairly good road and with eight hours' start, it could reach this before the enemy, who was mostly on foot, could arrive by the shorter road through Bewal. Sending on a summons to Rashát for every man that could be spared, Walcot, who commanded the cavalry, had orders to wait the arrival of Mir Khan from Bewal, and then, making as much dust as possible, to retire slowly on Rashát, fighting as determined a rear-guard action as he could without exposing his men, in order to draw Mir Khan after him across the Gul. It was Terrington's hope that the Khan, seeing British troops beyond the Gul, would imagine that the entire force had reached it by a superhuman effort and, after a perfunctory search of the road towards Sar, would follow furiously in order to drive it headlong into Rashát.

To complete the deception, the central portion of Terrington's force, consisting of the Sikhs and Bakót levies in charge of the transport, were to remain concealed and not to approach the Gul till the Khan's intentions became apparent; and the Guides forming the rearguard had orders so to delay pursuit along the river road from Sar that the pursuers' fire should not reach Mir Khan's ears at the Gul for at least twelve hours after he had reached it.

Then if Mir Khan came to the lure, and followed Walcot, the Sikhs were to push on at full speed, seize the road where it crossed the Gul, and await the rush for safety of the enemy on finding that he was trapped.

It was a scheme of extreme audacity, but in its audacity lay its safety. In splitting up his little force Terrington seemed to be offering it for destruction in detail, but the offering was of such effrontery that no one, and Mir Khan least of all, was likely to be prepared for it. It afforded, so far as Terrington could see, his only chance of a blow decisive enough to cripple for the moment Mir Khan's power. If it failed of that the force was doomed. Yet, if it should fail, what else would have succeeded?

Though Terrington had urged Rose Chantry to rest while she could, the morning light was peering between the curtains of the doolie before sleep closed her eyes. She listened all night to the silent march: the grunts and whinny of the mules, the jangle of harness, the low-spoken orders of unseen men. And under it all the beat of feet in the dust, the quick clatter of driven hoofs, the dull even tramp of armed men.

When she woke it was high noon and her doolie was resting upon the ground. She pulled aside the curtain and looked out upon a land unknown to her. The doolie stood against a clump of tamarisk, but no other greenness met her eye in that valley of stones. The river bubbled somewhere beneath her out of sight; and, reaching to the sky, on either side of it stood astounding walls of rock, some sheer and broken into awful precipices, others vast shelving slopes of shale which gave an even more oppressive sense of distance and desolation than the cliffs themselves. A jagged ribbon of blue sky showed between them overhead, scarcely wider than the hidden bed of the river, and the sun blazed down into that cleft of air like the mouth of a furnace.

The heat fastened with a slap upon her hand as she stretched it out into the sunlight, and the whole valley seemed to bend and waver in the clear vapour that streamed from every stone. A little green tent was pitched beside the doolie under the tamarisk, but the only other sign of a camp came from the span, of mules being driven down to the water, and some fifty brown blankets stretched between rifles and pegged down with bayonets in the shade of which men were lying in every shape of dreamless sleep. They looked, even to her unpractised eye, terribly few in that wilderness of space.

As she crawled out of the doolie she discovered that there was a sentry posted over her and the tent, who presented arms, much to her embarrassment, as she scrambled up from her knees.

She could see no sign of her ayah, but in the tent she found her dressing-things laid out on a folding camp-table; there was a canvas basin on a trestle, which was also none of hers, and a canvas bath on the floor.

She questioned the sentry in her broken mixture of tongues about the ayah, but he could tell her nothing, and evidently had not seen a woman about the place.

So, very shyly, and after cautious tying of the tent-flap, testing of its skirts, and closing of its little grated window, she began her first toilet in camp, pausing, poised, to listen to every strange sound without, and especially between every splash of the water in her bath.

She was coiling her hair about her head before the tiny mirror in one dense twist, which displayed better than any fashionable device its golden thickness, when she heard the slap of the sentry's hand on the stock of his rifle, and Terrington's voice outside the tent.

"Hope you slept," it rang out cheerily. "Gholam is getting us something to eat as soon as you're ready."

Rose Chantry's head came through the flap of the tent, with a white arm and elbow moulding the last roll of her hair.

"Where's my ayah?" she asked plaintively.

"I wish I knew," said Terrington, handing over his horse to a sais and lifting his helmet. "When we started last night she wasn't to be found. You'll have to put up, I'm afraid, with Gholam's valeting."

He offered her the idea lightly, as though it were all part of a picnic; but he had ridden through the night, after the ayah's flight had been discovered, tortured by the thought of the woman, sleeping in the litter in front of him, young, lovely, widowed and alone among six hundred men, without a single other of her sex to shield her from the coarseness and defilement of war.

He well knew how men, pressed by the necessities of the field and simplified by the daily presence of death, reverted to a savage shamelessness, a sweeping aside of convention, not at all to their discredit, but of a very fearful grossness to a woman's eyes: and he felt, contemplating the future of the next few days, almost as if he were the accomplice of some iniquitous abduction.

Rose Chantry noticed—she was learning to notice—that Terrington had not been out of the saddle since he left Sar. A smoke of dust fell from the wrinkles of his tunic and breeches as he slid to the ground, and there were tiny furrows of dust upon his face. She noticed too—but that needed no learning—how the searching hard-browed look of the scout went suddenly out of his eyes as they fell upon her, and the lines about his lips relaxed. He had ridden forward to the hanging bridge where alone the river could be crossed below the Gul, as Walcot had sent back word that it would require strengthening to carry the transport, and he was of necessity his own engineer. So he had missed the sleep and meal of which his men had partaken, and had some reason to look way-worn when he appeared before Rose Chantry's tent after thirty hours of unceasing strain.

Yet when he reappeared, washed and shaven, fifteen minutes later, he seemed as alert as though he had but just left his bed. Responsibility always endued him with double strength.

Gholam Muhammed could discover nothing better than a broken biscuit-case to set the breakfast on, so Rose brought out the camp table from her tent and improvised a tablecloth from a Russian towel.

Terrington, returning to find her seated in the shade of the tamarisk making tea, looking, thanks to the close coils about her head, more astoundingly young than ever, blithe and fresh as an English morning, caught his breath with a sharper sense of her isolation.

He seated himself on the biscuit-case at the further side of the table, and his glance travelled from her up the forbidding precipices, and back again to her trim figure.

"Well!" she enquired provokingly; "you're wishing me a thousand miles away?"

"I am," he nodded.

"You're not half grateful for your mercies," she retorted; "it ought to be rather a change to have a woman to pour out tea for you before a battle!"

"Oh, it is a change," he smiled.

She handed him a mug of blue and white enamel.

"And is there going to be a battle?"

"Not to-day," he said.

"To-morrow?"

"Probably."

"And shall we all be killed?"

"It's not impossible," he said gravely.

She leant her lips down to her own brimming mug and looked across at him over its edge.

"Don't you wish you were safe back in Sar?" she said.

He shook his head as she lifted and drained the mug and set it down with a sigh of content.

"I was so thirsty. Isn't it grilling? Why did you make me wear these clothes? I can't see much sign of the snows. Isn't this tinned milk horrid? What's become of all the men? You don't seem to have kept many to look after me! Will you have an egg?"

"Please," said Terrington to her last question.

"Was that your bath and basin I had this morning?" she went on.

"It was," he said.

"I don't see why I should be clean at your cost," she demurred.

"Oh, you're not," he assured her; "you're the only one in the force with time to be clean at all, and even you won't want to wash after to-morrow."

"We shall all be killed, shan't we?" she asked mischievously.

"Whether or not," he said drily; "we shall be too cold to have much use for water."

"I can't imagine such a condition just now," she answered.

"You'll be able to when you've crossed the Palári," said Terrington quietly.

She twisted her chair sideways, put one hand above the other across the back of it, and leant her chin upon them both. She watched Terrington so for a few seconds while he finished his egg. Then she asked:

"What have you done with Captain Walcot?"

"He's commanding the advance-guard."

"Miles and miles away?"

"I hope so by now," he said.

"Is he going to fight to-day?"

"No."

"To-morrow? When we all do?"

"Mir Khan permitting," said Terrington with a smile.

"Will it be more dangerous where he is than where we shall be?"

"No," said Terrington; "rather safer. He'll have a line of retreat."

"Safer!" she echoed with astonishment; "then why didn't you send me with him?"

Terrington looked at her thoughtfully as he inverted the tin of milk above his mug.

"Pure selfishness," he said. "I wanted some one to pour out tea for me before the battles."

"I don't see why you shouldn't speak the truth," she pouted.

"I don't see why you should want it spoken if you know it so well," he said.

"You were afraid to send me with him!" she thrust out sharply.

"Was I?" he said, cutting off the drip of the milk with his spoon.

"Yes! You were afraid he'd spend his time with me instead of looking after his men."

Terrington pushed the kedgeri towards her persuasively, but she shook her head.

"Do you know that Captain Walcot is in love with me?" she went on.

"How should I?" he said, helping himself to the dish she had declined.

She gave a little hopeless sigh at his obtuseness and a complacent tilt of the head.

"He's been in love with me ever since he came to Sar," she asserted.

"Has he?" said Terrington, puzzled by the confidence.

"Yes," she nodded. "You think that very wrong, I suppose?"

"Well," he admitted mildly, "do you think it very right yourself."

She straightened her shoulders, lifting her chin, and her grip tightened on the back of the chair.

"It's not a question of what I do or don't think right," she said with sudden fierceness; "it's a question of what a woman's got to be and to put up with out here if she's tolerably good looking. You think we're just silly fools, who laugh and chatter and let men make love to us. You don't know that it's just to keep things pleasant, and prevent rows for one's husband in little places like Sar, where every one's jumbled together, that one does laugh, and chatter, and pretend not to see things, and seem to like things that one hates. You suppose, because we don't make a fuss, that we're frivolous and empty-headed, and don't think for a moment what a time you'd have of it if we went in for being anything else."

"No," said Terrington doubtfully; "I don't suppose we do."

He was perplexed by her revelation, never imagining that it came of a desire for his good opinion, and resenting her careless sacrifice of another man's secret. He knew nothing about women, nor how little they counted a loss of honour from the sacrifice of anything in what could be considered an excusing cause.

So that he was quite unprepared when, with her elbow propped upon the chair, and turning her back upon his vague admission, she said in a voice uncontrollably unsteady.

"Oh, I know what you think of me!"

Terrington, who neither knew what he thought of her nor what she thought he thought of her, held his tongue, and Rose, with her back still towards him, and after a sniff at the opposite hills, continued less precariously:

"Do you think it's impossible for a woman to change?"

"Oh, surely," he protested, smiling; "that's never been urged against her."

"You might be serious when you know I am," she said with such a grieved reproach that Terrington repented his levity. "Mayn't a woman learn something sometimes from things that happen, even though she was once a fool?"

"Yes, I'm sure she may," he assented heartily; "and much quicker than a man."

She turned about towards him gratefully.

"Yes," she sighed, "but you'll never believe that I shall be good for anything, after what I did in Sar?"

"Oh, shan't I!" he said cheerily. He finished his tea, and smiled at her with a new friendliness across the table. "Look here," he said, "I'm going to turn in, and I want you to wake me in an hour's time. Will you?"

She nodded.

"But you want more than an hour."

"Yes," he said, "but I'm not going to get it." He looked at his wrist. "That'll be on the stroke of three. You've got a watch?"

She held hers to her ear.

"It's stopped," she said.

He unfastened his from his wrist and handed it to her.

"Wouldn't you like a sleep yourself," he suggested.

"Oh, no!" she said.

He threw himself down in the shade of the tamarisk, and, leaning on his elbow, glanced at her for a moment doubtfully.

"It's only to be an hour," he reminded her; "not what you think I want."

"You're going to be called at three," she said precisely.

He smiled at her little air of responsibility as he laid his head down upon his arm, and she, seeing that he had nothing on which to rest it, got up quickly and fetched him a pillow from her doolie.

"Why didn't you ask me for it," she said reproachfully.

He took it from her with another smile.

"I'm so unused to the luxury of being looked after by a lady."

But he gave her hand a clasp which meant a good deal more to it than gratitude.

Rose Chantry sat almost motionless during the hour which followed, in that happy sort of preoccupation which is outside of time. She had strapped on Terrington's watch, to feel the loose shackle of it about her thin wrist, and looked now and again at its face with startled consciousness, unaware if minutes or hours had gone by since her last inspection.

The valley lay oppressively silent in the fierce heat. The mirage had eaten up its northern end, and the close-set precipices had melted into an open space of air, which showed, with the strangest effect of disappearance, nothing beyond.

Thin blue threads of smoke stretched up to heaven from the forsaken camp fires, and the mules which had come back from watering floundered in the dust; but nothing else seemed to move between those walls of stone except the ceaseless waver of the heated air.

Terrington slept without stirring; his lips set as firmly as when he was awake, his lids closed like a mask in bronze, as if rather with determination than from drowsiness.

Rose could not help comparing the strong guarded look of his sleeping face with the flaccid abandonment of Lewis Chantry's, who always slumbered with his mouth open and his eyelids half apart.

At three she leant over and put her finger upon his arm, and his eyes opened quiet and wide awake as though she had touched the spring of his consciousness.

He rose at once, whistled for his horse, was in the saddle three minutes later, and riding, a solitary figure, up the gray road of the stony valley towards the bridge.

Rose Chantry watched till the undulating outlines of both horse and rider were dissolved in the distorting glare, with a feeling in her heart which no man before had ever brought there.

IX

An hour later Terrington returned, and the march recommenced. The bridge had been strengthened, but even so it looked perilous enough, and Rose, after seeing one of the mules lurch over and burst to a pulp on the rocks beneath, preferred to walk across with a rope about her than to be carried in the doolie.

Afterwards she fell asleep and was only wakened when Terrington drew aside the curtain and told her that it was time for dinner. The doolie was on the ground again, but the night was black about it and a cold air seemed to be pouring down out of the sky.

Rose shivered as she pushed the curtains aside and stepped out into the darkness. Spaces of pitchy gloom on either side of her, and a sparkling riband of stars overhead showed the force to be still in the defile, but something ghostlike and pale seemed to come between the stony blackness and the stars. It was the light of the snows.

A few yards beyond the doolie a fire flickered, over which Gholam was leaning, peering into a pot; and further off some score of camp-fires pierced the darkness with clear pointed cones of flame.

As she came into the circle of the firelight Terrington appeared beside her, the poshteen in his hand.

"Sleep well?" he asked as he helped her arms into it, and turning her round towards him by the collar, buttoned the frogs across her chest as though she were a child.

"It fits you proper!" he proclaimed, surveying her at arm's length.

She smiled at his motherly vigilance, but felt with keen happiness its protective care. He made her feel so completely in his charge that, had he given her a kiss as he buttoned her coat, it would have seemed no more than she had been accustomed to from others who had dressed her.

He drew a stool for her to the fire, recounted the humorous mischances of the journey while she had been asleep, and jested over the ingredients in the stew which Gholam was making them.

The frank fraternity in his manner increased her sense of a girlhood which had come back to her. She sat listening to his talk with the smiling happy-serious air of youth. And they ate together of the stew with great relish despite the suggestions he proposed to find in its bones. And when they had finished the modest little dinner, Terrington spread a rug beside the fire, and they sat close to the red verge of it, for comfort of the warmth; Rose, resting on her wrist, with her feet tucked under her, girlishly erect, and with the big collar of the poshteen turned up about her ears, but Terrington, at greater ease, leaning upon his elbow with his body bent towards the flames.

Rose, however, did not have him altogether to herself. The approach of action was signalled by a succession of orderlies, for whom brief notes had to be written, and Hussain Shah arrived later for a consultation.

Still, despite its interruptions the time seemed to her the most delightful she had ever spent. She was tasting for the first time what it meant to feel.

The blazing fire pushed the night back from a brief circle about them, and, when the flame fell, the darkness seemed to leap forward like a black thing with wings trying to spring from behind upon their shoulders.

In the darkness was the unknown morrow, and death, and the blood and horror of battle; and in the firelight just the man and herself; the man who was showing her a new unknown kind of manliness, and herself with all her married days and ways forgot, listening like a girl to her first discovery in heroes.

"Time to turn in," said Terrington, as he came back out of the darkness on parting from Hussain. "We start at two; and no one can say when we sleep again, so do all you know. I'll see if your doolie is ready."

She turned out one little hand to the flame with a shiver.

"Oh, I can't leave the fire," she said. "Mayn't I sleep here?"

He looked at her with the air of considering her request as a reasonable proposition.

"I don't see why you shouldn't," he said; "I'll fetch your blankets."

He fetched the mattress as well, and the boots he had given her, which he happened to find inside the doolie.

"You must wear these," he said, "if you sleep out."

She took them from him with a sigh of submission, sat down upon the mattress and prepared to pull them on.

"Don't put your hand into them," he said warningly.

She opened her eyes in question.

"It may make you cry," he smiled.

She repaid his memory with a glance of pleased surprise, and shook her head softly.

"Not now!" she said.

She held up the boot towards him, and thrust her arm down into its depths.

"So warm," she purred.

She covered her shyness in pulling them on before him with the pretence that they were much too tight.

Terrington smiled at her efforts.

"I'm afraid you'll grow out of them very soon," he said.

Then he tucked her in under the blankets and wrapping himself in his cloak lay down beside her. She risked the comfort in which he had arranged her to stretch out a small white hand to him to say good-night; and he held it long enough to express to her the subtle newness and nearness in their common knowledge that such a night might mean.

Rose seemed only to have just ceased to watch the changing colour of the flame on Terrington's face when a hand was laid on her shoulder and his voice spoke in her ear. She jumped up, dreaming of battles, so stiff that she would have fallen but for the arm which he put under hers. The doolie suddenly appeared out of the darkness, he helped her in, bade her good-bye with a clasp of the hand, dropped a sharp order to the sentry who strode beside her, and was gone. The bearers moved off at a quick amble, and when they halted she knew she was amongst men. The night was still of an impenetrable black and she could see nothing between her curtains, but she heard in the silence the shuffle of feet, and the grunted "Huh!" of the Bakót men as they fell in half awake and hitched up their accoutrements.

Then with a whisper the jampanis moved on, and to the swinging to and fro of the doolie she fell asleep.

X

Rose woke to a sense of excitement which pierced her sleep.

"Tell him they're right down here in front of us," she heard Dore's voice in a hard whisper. "And take that doolie back," he added angrily.

The doolie spun round, but before it was gone a hundred yards Rose stopped the bearers.

The morning was gray, cold, and very still, just after dawn. A white wet mist had come down upon the hills, and hung from cliff to cliff like a ceiling cloth across the valley. Ahead, laid out behind boulders of blue grey stone, she could see the yellowish attenuated line of Dore's Sikhs spread like a fan on either side of the road.

A runner, naked but for his loin-cloth, and throwing up the dust from the soles of his feet, went by towards the front, coming back somewhat less hurriedly ten minutes later.

There was no further sound nor sign of life for half an hour, and then Terrington with an orderly came in view round the bend of the road riding slowly. He stopped with a smile of wonder where Rose was sitting on a stone before her doolie at the side of the road.

"However did you get here?" he asked.

"Mr. Dore sent me back," she pouted.

"Sent you back!" he echoed. "I should think he did."

She came up to his horse's shoulder, and with a "Good morning," offered him her hand.

"Is it going to be a fight?" she asked as he took it.

"It is," he answered, "and you're in front of the firing line. You must wait here till I return to you."

She stood back demurely with her hands behind her, and he rode on with some injunction to her sentry which she did not understand.

He was met, she saw, by Dore near the line of skirmishers, and in obedience to some command the section on either side of the road turned outwards and began to creep up the steep sides of the valley, taking cover, when they halted, so effectively that not a man was to be seen.

Just as the last of them had disappeared a rifle rang out, faintly, far ahead.

Rose, who had not taken her eyes from Terrington, stiffened at the sound, and stood tensely listening with an ear towards it.

She had to wait a full five minutes till the shot was repeated, but hard upon that followed the soft rattle of a fusillade. Though it sounded vague and dull as the patter of rain on water, she knew it at once for what it was, and started forward eagerly towards it along the road.

The sentry, mindful of Terrington's injunction, tried to stop her, but she ordered him to stand aside with such imperious authority that he gave way, and Rose went on towards the spot where Terrington was posted above the road with his glasses raised. He was so absorbed in the scene they gave him that he did not hear Mrs. Chantry's approach, and was only aware of her presence beside him when he turned to search for the Sikhs upon the hill.

He lowered his glasses sharply and faced her with a frown.

"I told you to wait for me," he said reprovingly.

"I know," she murmured, "but I couldn't. I'm no good at waiting." Then, as this information brought no softening to his eyes, she added defiantly: "I don't see why you should treat me as a child. I don't intend to be kept out of danger."

"There's no danger here to keep you out of," said Terrington, "except the danger of your being seen." His eyes took in her troubled face and his manner changed suddenly to a reasoning gentleness. "You see the fight's right away over there, beyond the Gul. Mir Khan's pushing Walcot back on Rashát, and we hope he thinks he's got us all. We're hiding here, in case he sends any one to look for us along the road to Sar, and the game would be up if he spotted us."

He helped her up on to a stone which gave her a view over the low ridge in front of them, and handed her his glasses. Then, as she did not know how to use them, he turned her round to him, and fitted them to her eyes, and standing behind her with his hands over her shoulders, shifted the lens till they suited her sight.

The mists had lifted, and she could see without assistance the entrance to the double-headed valley where the gorge which brought the road from Bewal joined that from Sar. Beyond their junction was the famous Gul, showing as a dark cleft across the valley, and, again beyond that the hills closed in about a defile more forbidding than that through which they had come.

Here and there across the throat of it, like tufts of bog cotton, burst little white puffs of smoke, where Walcot's men were holding back Mir Khan's reconnaissance. The force they covered was so well concealed that even the glass revealed no sign of it, but the Khan's advance could be traced in specks and streaks of whitish yellow climbing out of the Gul, which Walcot had made but a feint of defending, and creeping dispersedly towards the puffs of smoke.

Down the valley towards Bewal the Khan's main body could be made out. Dark masses of men divided by varying spaces and mingling in the distance with driven flocks and herds. The dull morning glimmer of steel wavered over it like the light upon a spider's web.

Near the centre was a body of horsemen tailing out along the road, which made a gay tendril of colour even at that leaden hour, it was the Khan's bodyguard in purple and fawn and gold.

As Rose Chantry moved the glasses from end to end of the enemy's column, her certainty of a safe return to India collapsed utterly.

She looked round at Terrington, expecting to see the same despair on his face that had seized upon her heart, but he was watching Mir Khan's advance with an unaltered countenance.

"Oh, Captain Terrington!" she cried hopelessly, "there are thousands of them: they'll eat us up."

He put a hand under each of her elbows and lifted her down from the stone.

"Well!" he said smiling, "we're going to play the dickens with their digestion."

They walked down to the road where Dore was standing with Terrington's mare.

"You need send back word of nothing," said Terrington, "we overlook your position. Keep your men where they are, no matter what force may pass you, and don't fire a shot till you get the signal."

This laying of a line of fire across the neck of the defile had been Terrington's last piece of daring, to cover the chance of Mir Khan's detaching a force to search the Sar road strong enough to pen the British troops in the defile and prevent their issuing to fall upon the flank of the men engaging Walcot beyond the Gul.

Terrington realized the possibility of such a move on seeing the size of the force which the Khan had so unexpectedly collected, and added at once this risk the more to the many he was taking in order to make the enemy's defeat sufficiently disastrous to deter him for a few hours from pursuit.

He nodded a farewell to Dore, lifted Rose into the saddle, and walked back beside her.

She leant forward to pat the mare's neck and get a side view of his face.

"Are you awfully excited?" she asked shyly.

His thoughtful eyes came round to her.

"Awfully!" he said, smiling.

He signed to the doolie to follow them, and led the way back along the road, which rose slowly for about a mile. There was nowhere any sign of life, and the fight and the scene behind them seemed suddenly to have passed out of being.

They went a little way in silence, and then Rose Chantry said gravely:

"Captain Terrington, do you really think we shall beat them?"

He put a hand on the saddle behind her.

"Are you afraid, child?" he asked.

She nodded pensively.

"I can't help it," she broke out with a sort of petulance; "I do so love being alive: and I've had so little of it; only just the last few years."

He looked up into her face, with its gay air of beauty softened and sobered by the thought of death.

"Yes," he said, "I understand."

She searched his expression doubtfully.

"Only for me?" she questioned.

"Oh, I'm not a lovely woman," he smiled.

"Who told you that I was?" she asked him.

"Ah! I've found it out for myself," he sighed.

"Have you?" she said without conviction. "And aren't you afraid to die?"

"A man has to be afraid of other things more," he told her quietly.

A sharp turn of the road brought them suddenly into the Dogra's camp. Though no fires were burning the men were round their cooking-pots finishing a meal; food and sleep in Terrington's conception going half way always towards winning a fight.

He lifted Rose out of the saddle, asked her if she were equal to a climb, and together they clambered up the ridge of shale on the north of the valley at the head of which Hussain Shah had his post of observation.

The track was steep and the stones slippery, so that for most of the way Rose's hand was in his, and when they came to a spot where the shale slope was half afloat in water he stooped, with the remark that he must carry her, and lifted her on his arm; setting her feet down, an instant later, upon a rock, in order to seat her for greater ease upon his shoulder.

She sat erect, with one hand under his chin, rejoicing in the air of mastery that never thought to ask her leave, and in his strength which was more severely tried than she suspected by the shifting stone and slush.

Hussain's post overlooked the ridge where Dore was lying, and commanded a view of the valley towards Bewal; but the eastern trend of the road hid Walcot's doings beyond the Gul.

Hussain at once began an elaborate explanation in Pukhtu, Terrington nodding his head and following the indications of the other's hands, but Rose could not tell by any outward sign how the recital affected him. He turned to her when it ended, and told her they were going higher for a wider view. She pleaded to go with him, but he merely shook his head, smiling at the chaos of rocks above them, over which a goat only could go in safety.

Rose sat herself down in a corner of the sangar opposite the three signallers, and watched Terrington and Hussain haul themselves up the scarp, taking cover as warily as though they were stalking sambur, yet never hesitating nor halting for an instant, the Risaldar a length in front, and Terrington swinging hand and foot after him in absolute accord.

They disappeared behind a buttress, and Rose fell to watching the signallers, two bronzed and splendid sepoys and a havildar of the Guides, whose blue and white flag slapped ceaselessly in the air.

Far away upon a spur above the road by which they had come she could make out the flutter of an answering signal, and, while she tried to follow it, suddenly a star of light winked like a sunlit window on the hill-side far down the defile.

It stirred the little group like the fall of a shell. The havildar thrust his paper and pencil on the unoccupied sepoy, hoisted the heliograph over his shoulder, and scrambled out of the sangar with his head turning as he went for a glimpse of the unexpected sun. He had his tripod settled, and an answering shaft of light was flying from his mirror down the valley before the flag had ceased its flapping behind him, but not before the nearer station had also found the sunlight and set a second star in the gray sameness of the hills. The flag fell, the click of the mirror took up the speech of its shaken folds, and dazzling lances of sunlight flung from ten miles away began tilting with the lashes of Rose Chantry's eyes. She was so absorbed by the strangeness of their silent language, that she was startled to find that Terrington had dropped alone and unnoticed from the rocks above her, and was scribbling a message which he handed as he finished it to the havildar.

He stood watching intently the answering flashes, twice prompting the reader when he was at fault. Rose, conscious of a certain still determination which had come into his manner, went over and stood beside him.

"Has anything happened?" she asked, as the answer to his order sparkled in the air.

He wrote a second message before replying; then he put his hand in her arm and walked her back to the sangar.

"Yes," he said; "Mir Khan is proving himself to be a good soldier. He's going to take no risks."

"Are you taking any?" she asked.

"Oh, yes!" he smiled; "I'm taking them all. That's the worst of being the weaker side."

He stopped, and looked out again over the Bewal valley, where the enemy's forces could be seen dividing in the form of a Y, one arm leading towards the Sorágh Gul and the other towards the entrance of the Sar defile, where Dore was lying.

"He's coming this way?" she suggested.

"Yes," he assented, "he's coming this way—half of him. He's either found out our little game, or he's going to make sure we're not playing it. So we've got to fight him here."

"Is that worse for us?" she enquired anxiously.

He nodded.

"And who's over there?" she asked, with a tilt of her head towards the distant hills.

"Subadar Afzul Singh and the Guides," he said; "but thanks to Mir Khan, they can move up now, which is a point to us. And now we must go down to lunch."

It was all so evidently the playing of a game to him, though the stakes were life and death, that she was infected for the moment by his incentive to the forgetfulness of her own fears, and asked eagerly of Afzul's march as they went down the hill together.

Terrington expected the Guides in three hours, and though he had no fear of being unable to hold out until they joined him, it was a question if he could delay his counter attack so long without rendering Dore's position too precarious. Everything would depend on the pace at which the enemy advanced and the force employed for his first attack.

When they came again to the water, Terrington knelt down without a word, and Rose seated herself with a laugh upon his shoulder.

But he did not set her down when the wet space was crossed, but carried her on to the little green tent which Gholam had pitched above the road, laughing to her protests that it was one of the disadvantages of being so light that people would insist on carrying her.

The signal which had dropped from the ridge had set all the camp in motion.

Men were building sangars; boxes of ammunition were being unloaded from mules and carried up the hill; all signs of a camp had disappeared and the transport was slowly toiling back by the way it had come.

Rose declared herself to be too excited to eat, but Terrington insisted on her finishing what he thought sufficient, and set her an example in appetite in spite of numerous interruptions.

No one could say, he reminded her, where nor of what their next meal might be.

Then he found her a place from which she could see, as she insisted, the progress of the fight in the greatest safety, posted her doolie with its bearers behind, and left the faithful Gholam in charge of her.

"I mayn't see you again," he said, taking her hand, "but word will be sent to him, and you must do as he tells you, as we may have to make a dash to get over to the Gul."

"And if we're beaten will we go back?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"If we're beaten we shall die here," he said quietly.

She held out her other hand to him.

"I'm not afraid now," she said under her breath.

An hour of anxious waiting followed, then the enemy's scouts began to appear on the road in the gap of the ridge that Dore was holding.

As the ridge offered them no advantages and the searching of it entailed exposure, they kept to the lower ground and came on slowly on either side of the road. An advance-guard followed, and then a body of horsemen, the valley growing slowly brown with them.

They halted with evident suspicion of Terrington's tactics, but came on again, reassured by the safety of the scouts, who were within a few yards of the lower sangars, before, following the signal stammer of the Maxim from the road, fire opened from the whole line at once upon the packed mass in the valley.

The result should have been disastrous to the attackers had the shooting been even fairly accurate, which unfortunately it was not. The Dogras included a very small proportion of marksmen, and the Bakót men had not outlived their remembrance of the matchlock, and probably fired over the heads of everything. Some score of the scouts were turned over, and a few men and horses fell in the main body, chiefly to the Maxim. The remainder scampered for cover in all directions, followed by an independent fusillade which did very little harm. At the sound of the firing, reinforcements began to pour through the gap above which the Sikhs lay, silent but excited spectators, and in a very short time the attack was more cautiously renewed.

The high ground which Terrington was holding on either wing converged forward from his centre, so that the Saris in trying to force the road found themselves exposed to a crescent of fire, and after a vain attempt to rush the Maxim, fell back, and by creeping up the sides of the valley began a movement to outflank him from above.

For this they only needed time to be successful, as the defenders' line was already stretched beyond the limits of safety, and Terrington watched with varying anxiety the progress of this movement, the gathering mass of the enemy on the road beneath him, and the slow closing up of the Guides in his rear.

He gained some time by a sortie from either flank, cutting off the men who were climbing above him, but this only forced them to make a wider circuit and postponed their eventual success. He returned from this sally, a smoking carbine in his hand, his face smeared with heat and dust, and a bullet-hole through his helmet, to find Rose standing in the sangar which he had quitted, watching him with proud admiration.

The enemy's centre was following the sortie back with every rifle that could bear upon it, and bullets were striking in front of the sangar and flying over it like brazen winged bees. Two or three men had been hit, and Terrington stooped to lift one of them into safety before he could speak to Rose.

"Go back!" he said almost angrily. "What are you doing here?"

"I shan't!" she returned defiantly. "I'm going to be with you."

Terrington turned to direct the carrying of the wounded down to the road: then he put his hand upon her shoulder and said quietly.

"Go back, please, for my sake, to the doolie, we're all going forward in a few minutes."

Gholam, who had been standing beside her, with an expression, turned towards Terrington, of absolute impotence, gave a little jump and clapped his hand to his elbow.

"Are you hit?" said Terrington.

The man withdrew his hand, looked at it, all smeared with blood, and salaamed.

"The Sahib's servant has the honour," he replied gravely.

Terrington placed himself more completely between Rose and the enemy's fire.

"Take him down, dear, will you, and tie him up?" he said.

The little endearing word moved her more than the command.

"Come!" she said, as though it were rather the servant than herself that was responsible for the trouble, and walked straight down to the doolie.

The enemy had made another dash on the centre after the sortie, and as it was driven back the signal was given Dore for which he had so eagerly been waiting, Terrington's hand having been forced by the increasing number of the enemy in front of him, the Guides being still a long way to the rear.

A bugle call replied to the signal, and Dore's men opened fire instantly on the crowded road beneath them.

The Saris turned at the sound, to find themselves penned between two lines of fire and the precipices of the defile.

It was little wonder that panic seized them; the long deferred disclosure of the trap adding to their apprehensions. Those nearest Dore's ridge dashed for the gap without an attempt at resistance, and those in front, seeing their supports in flight, fell back, firing wildly in both directions.

The Bakót men finding the foe in retreat began to shoot with more effect, but Terrington, trusting rather to their knives for slaughter and feeling that the decisive moment was come, signalled to the Guides, still three miles away, to press forward, and ordered a general advance.

The Dogras, being on the lower ground, were the first to get within thrusting distance, and closed on a terrified huddle of men swinging this way and that in frenzied efforts to escape like a frightened flock of sheep, and crying out for mercy from the bayonets that pierced them from behind. The mercy meted out to them was the mercy of the Durbar—a swift end, and the scorn of born fighters in their ears; and, as the Bakót levies descended with their crooked knives upon the scurrying flanks, the Saris flung away their arms and fought with each other to escape the avengers.

Terrington stopped the pursuit with the utmost difficulty as it came under the fire which Dore was pouring upon the fugitives, and sent volley after volley with deadly effect into the maddened wedge of men penned in the gap. It was absolute butchery, and the struggling men fell to the bullets in sheaves across the road, the life blown out of them at three hundred paces.

The Sikhs continued to fire despite Terrington's attempt to stop them so long as any of the flying mob remained beneath them, and then, scampering over to the other side of the ridge, opened on the runaways as they emerged from the defile.

Terrington pushed the Dogras forward into the gap as soon as the bullets of the Sikhs had ceased to search it, and discovered at once, in spite of his advantage, the greatness of the task in front of him.

Mir Khan, realizing from the sound of battle in the defile the trick which had been played him, was throwing forward every man he could spare to shut Terrington within it till he could extricate the force which Walcot had skilfully drawn after him up the road to Rashát.

Terrington gathered at a glance that the disorder which the flight of the panic-stricken Saris was creating in the ranks of the reinforcements offered him the one chance of getting his transport out of the defile and of holding a fighting position on the ground beyond it.

So, though the Guides were not yet in sight, and his force utterly inadequate to the task before it, he pressed on upon the heels of the fugitives which were blinding the enemy's front, in order to give Dore's men on the south of the road an opening to descend from the ridge and crumple the broken flank back upon the centre. So soon as he saw that the Sikhs were in motion he pushed the Dogras forward in the centre to maintain touch with them, and cover the egress of his transport from the defile, taking the Bakót men along himself to prevent an enveloping movement on the other flank. This, the extreme right, was the weak point in his advance, since he had not sufficient men for an extension to gain the support of the hill-side, and the enemy's line was long enough to overlap him, and, by passing round his right, to force him off the road and close the entrance to the defile behind him while the Guides were still within it. This was the critical hour of the day, for Mir Khan, who had hurried back from the Gul to direct the attack, at once realized his advantage, and leaving his right to take care of itself, swung all his horsemen round to the other wing, and sent them dismounted clambering over the further slopes of the valley, while he himself advanced against Terrington in front. Sending word to the half of Dore's force, which still lined the ridge on the north of the gap, to get still higher up the hill and threaten in turn to outflank the enemy's flankers, Terrington set himself to hold the half-trained Bakót levies in a position which would have tried the morale of the best disciplined troops.

In this, without the special help of Heaven, he certainly would not have succeeded, since in order to keep his men together he had to expose himself in a fashion that should have brought death to him twenty times in the day.

Rose Chantry who, with the rest of the transport, had been hurried through the gap and left to find what cover they could in the open ground beyond it, watched him through her glasses, standing erect amongst the men who were crawling and slithering at his feet, with a growing wonderment of appreciation for the manner of man he was. She saw him pounce upon one skulker who was trying to slink away, lift him like a dog by the neck to his full length, march him forward in the face of the bullets, and fling him down again in the firing line.

The charmed life which he seemed to wear had its effect at last upon the superstitions of the men he was leading, and a fatalist spirit took the place of their fears. This improved their pluck if it did not mend their shooting; yet Terrington was compelled none the less to retire them, leaving his dead and badly wounded behind him, as the enemy's flankers had worked round far enough to enfilade him. He was thus compelled to fall back slowly for the better part of a mile, until his supports became entangled with the head of the transport column. This caused the officer in charge of the transport to attempt an immediate withdrawal, forgetting that the ground over which they had reached their present cover was now swept by the bullets which were passing over Terrington's head. The first two mules to emerge from the shelter of the rocks fell dead with their driver, and the significance of the little spirts of dust that barred the way was brought home to those that followed. The head of the column halted, the rest of it continued to advance, the mules becoming jammed into a huddled mass. Rose Chantry's bearers had picked her up when the retirement was ordered, and when it ceased and the crowding beasts began to accumulate round the doolie she put her head through the curtains and asked Gholam what had happened. He explained apologetically that the leaders of the transport were smitten with great fear.

"Go on," she shouted to her bearers, "and show them the way."

Gholam interpreted the order and the jampanis had shuffled timorously along for a few paces, when the enemy's flankers came in view of the disordered transport and with cries of triumph began to shoot down into it from the hill.

One of the jampanis was hit in the first fusillade, and, another dropping with fright, the doolie came with a crash to the ground, and Rose scrambled out of it, her teeth set and a little revolver in her hand, to face what would probably have proved the closing scene of the day's fight, had not, at that moment, the leading company of the Guides emerged from the defile.

They had come for three miles at the double and had no breath for shouting, but they extended with parade precision, and went straight for the scattered sharpshooters on the enemy's left.

But the day was too old for half measures. With a faith in reinforcements and a strong front, Terrington signalled Afzul Singh, who had, despite his forty-five years, outpaced on foot the youngest of his men, to keep his right shoulder up, thus ignoring the enemy's left and bringing the Guides through the broken Bakót men on the main road. Then, as the panting line came up to him, Terrington put himself in front of it and charged straight at Mir Khan's centre.

That part of the enemy's front, unaware, owing to the slope of the ground, of the Guides' arrival, only waited a snap of the trigger, as the wave of buff-clad men burst over the rise. Then it turned and ran.

Blown though his men were, Terrington carried them half a mile further before halting them. By doing so he cut in halves Mir Khan's line of battle and isolated his entire left wing, which did not need a second volley from the Guides to explain what had happened, and in an instant was leaping like a flock of goats over the shale slopes in wild retreat.

Leaving Afzul with half a company to complete the rout, Terrington wheeled the other half to the left, and, coming into line with the Dogras and Sikhs, fell upon the enemy's right, which had seen the defeat of the centre, and pressed it hotly down the hill.

He only carried the pressure far enough to clear the road, and, as soon as the second company of the Guides appeared in the gap to form his rear-guard a general movement began across the valley towards the Sorágh Gul; the Sikhs, Dogras and half a company of the Guides covering the transport on the south side, the second company of the Guides, breathless but athirst for battle, holding the road behind it, and the Bakót men still running like hounds over the great shale slopes on the north hacking down the flying Saris with their knives or shooting them like rabbits at a dozen yards.

It was a triumph of unhoped-for victory, but even yet was not complete. For the swiftness of Terrington's advance brought him to the Gul before the men who had been pursuing Walcot could recross it after the news of Mir Khan's defeat had reached their ears. The Gul was a ravine with sides almost precipitous and close upon two hundred feet in depth, with a torrent raging over its rocks which could only be forded at one place.

Walcot, reinforced by Freddy Gale with the garrison of Rashát had turned upon his pursuers, who reached in their flight one side of the Gul as Terrington's force appeared on the other.

Panic-stricken they plunged into its abyss to escape the bullets behind them, hoping to hide amongst the boulders in the torrent's bed.

But the river had risen behind them, and a foaming floor of water stretched from side to side of the chasm.

Clinging like conies to those bare declivities they were shot screaming for mercy or insane with fear, and fell like blood-gutted leeches into the flood beneath.

Terrington watched the slaughter, silent and stern, feeling to be but the avenging instrument of God, yet wishing for the qualities of a god to reconcile him to its pitilessness and inevitable injustice.

While he watched, his ear caught the click of little feet on the rocks, and he turned to find Rose Chantry beside him, gazing down upon the torment of that gulf of death.

"Go back!" he said hurriedly. "You mustn't see this."

She turned to him a little face fierce and white and ablaze with vengeance.

"I shall see it," she cried imperiously; "they killed my husband."

Yet her vengeance came rather from the relief of long pent anxiety, and it was less of her husband that she was thinking than of the man who had come back to her out of mortal danger, his coat ripped by bullets in two places and a dark scum of dried blood across his face from a flesh-wound in the temple.

XI

After a brief halt for a meal, Terrington sent on the Dogras to convoy the wounded to Rashát, the Bakót levies following at midnight with the transport. He would rely only on his tried fighters for the long rearguard action which would begin on the morrow, and only end beyond the Paldri.

But though the struggle of the next few days would mean hardship for all and death to many, the worst was over with that day's ordeal, on which had hung the safety of the entire force. Had Terrington been beaten, every man with him would have been massacred, Rashát would have fallen within a month, and his name held up to the scorn of the years to come as of one who had lacked the courage to stand to his post. Yet his victory had been, under Heaven, but an accident. He knew that well enough. That fight, the most sanguine for its size in Indian history, which has coloured the name as it dyed the water of Rashát river, would have been lost but for the arrival at its crisis of men on whose coming he had no right to count. It was won indeed, won in its overwhelming effectiveness by his subtlety, his daring tactics, his personal valour, but it would have been lost despite all those, despite any devices that men could have contrived, had not a certain company of the Guides possessed the splendid training and the undauntable energy of the men whom Afzul Singh had led.

Yet now he had, thanks to them, the redounding credit of it, who, but for them, would have borne its enduring shame.

Determined to hold the Gul on the morrow as long as possible, Terrington halted the Guides on the further side of it, and ordered them to turn in as soon as they had made a meal, while the Sikhs prepared defences and furnished pickets for the night. The Guides, save for their three miles' scurry, had been under fire all the way from Sar, and had not left a man behind them. Keen soldiers all of them, they forgot their own part in the day's success, and, when Terrington went down to inspect their camp, gathered from their cooking-pots and cheered him tempestuously.

Terrington laid his hand affectionately on Afzul's shoulder.

"You did it," he said gratefully; "you did it!"

The circle about his own camp fire was completed by Walcot and Freddy Gale, and it was there that Rose Chantry watched the ways of men who have come out of battle. Walcot, who had fought well and been slightly wounded in the shoulder, seemed unable to talk enough. Speech gurgled out of him like rain from a gargoyle. Freddy Gale listened, throwing in brief descriptive touches, his round merry face convulsed from time to time with infectious laughter. Terrington, who sat beside her, said nothing at all, but the keenness of his eyes was softened by a grave content.

Rose noticed the warmth of his greeting to Gale and his evident gladness to have a man under him on whose knowledge and judgment he could depend. Once, when leaning forward across the fire after dinner to ask Walcot a question, she put her hand unawares on Terrington's, which was lying on the ground. He did not move, and she took it in so tight a grip, that, as she settled herself again, he turned his head and looked smiling into her eyes.

The enemy had been so roughly handled that Mir Khan could not persuade his men on the morrow to a fresh attack across such an obstacle as the Gul, and Terrington after holding it till nightfall fell back upon Rashát.

But before he reached it the Saris were again upon his heels like a pack of famished wolves, ravenous for blood. During the three days' march to the foot of the Palári, the fighting never ceased night or day. In the dark it dwindled to the buzz or the slap of the sniper's bullet, varied by an attempt to rush a picket; doing only occasional damage but keeping the whole camp awake, and causing a suppression of the fires whose warmth was becoming with every hour more essential.

Dawn generally brought an attack on two or three points at once, and persistent efforts were made during the day to outclimb the British flanking parties and command the line of march.

Once, when these were successful, Terrington only obtained relief by an attack upon the centre, threatening the safety of the men above the valley, but the effort proved so expensive that he was obliged in the future still further to extend his wings and retire by continuous echelon up and down the slope of the hills. It was slow work.

Then, too, though his losses were not heavy, the carriage of the wounded was an increasing labour, and he was finally obliged to dismount the Lancers and use their beasts for his injured men.

The first fringe of the snow was hailed, for all its augury of hardship, with a shout of welcome.

As the men's feet slipped in its yielding softness, their eyes followed the vast white slope that stretched above them till it was lost in the grayness of the sullen sky. There, close under the heavens, tormented by winds that powdered the snowflakes into icy points and whirled them to and fro in furious eddies, lay the road to safety.

There was death in its blinding whiteness, death in its numbing torpor death in its piercing cold; but beyond was life and wife and honour and reward.

The sight of the snow drove Mir Khan to more desperate means, for, without some critical success, beyond the Palári he dared not go, since his opponents might be able to count on reinforcement, and the pass close behind him.

But to Terrington the pressure of the enemy now became less serious than the difficulties of the road. His men soon learnt the value of snow as a protection, and snow entrenchments were much more rapidly constructed than stone sangars. But with every march the strength of his coolies was declining, and they could scarcely carry their reduced loads. The horses, barely able to keep their footing on the frozen ground, became at once exhausted when the deep snow was reached, and had to be killed and eaten. This brought him almost to the end of his fuel, and left the wounded to be carried by effectives who were already beginning to feel the strain of constant fighting and the toil of forcing their way through a foot's depth of snow. Moreover every hour of ascent brought them into an air perceptibly rarer, and increased grievously the stress of every added effort.

On the second day they reached the terrible region of the winds, and for three hours waited helpless in a blast of icy crystals that cut the face till it bled, and froze the eyelids with the tears that it brought to them, and made every breath a pain.

The storm struck without warning. The snow ahead seemed suddenly to rise on end; the next instant the awful gray mist of ice was tearing past them. For those three hours it was impossible to move or to see. The air seemed as thick as a river jellied with snow, and even when the eyes could be opened, the clotted whiteness hid the end of one's arm. Where the men clung together in frightened and shivering groups, the wind piled drifts on the lee side up to their necks.

It seemed as though the snows of all the mountains was being swept into the sea, and yet scarcely a flake fell upon the rear-guard, fighting some few hundred feet below.

Terrington was alone when it fell, riding along the column, persuading, encouraging, helping, threatening; lifting, by sheer strength of will, the tired trail of men higher and higher. He slid off his shaggy barebacked little pony, turned its tail to the wind, and leant against it for the warmth which he knew both soon would need. He had an immense capacity for patience, but it failed him now; and its failure taught him what otherwise he might have waited long to learn. For through those long bitter hours it was not of his men that he thought—his men who had been his only care and love for years—but of Rose Chantry. Thought of her, crouching frightened in her doolie, fallen somewhere in the snow, the warmth going surely hour by hour from her frail shivering little body, the cold fingers of death slowly closing upon her, and no one by to bring her comfort and help her to be brave. The thought was agony to him, and by the agony he knew that it was love. Light, vain, fickle, ignorant, there were reasons enough, and he knew them, for not even liking her. He did not know, for that matter, if he did like her. He longed with indescribable solicitude to see her face again. That was all he knew.

Even the cold that crept numbingly through him could not stifle that desire. If the storm lasted for six hours no living thing would be left in the pass. He was not afraid of that. He feared to outlive it and find her dead.

Yet when the storm ceased as suddenly as it began, he made no search for her. He was still that much master of himself. Finding a floor of rock swept bare by the wind, he diverted the line of march across it, and there, with Clones, inspected all the men as they passed for frost-bite; and soon had a row of them laid out under blankets and vigorously rubbed with snow.

The wounded had suffered most; all the worst cases were dead, many were past help, and none had escaped injury: after them came the baggage carriers, ill-clad and ill-nourished as they were, nearly all of whom had paid for the exposure with a frozen foot or finger.

It was right at the end of the transport that Rose's doolie appeared, and to Terrington's immense relief she thrust out her head from the curtains as the bearers halted. It was a face fearfully pinched and cold, but there was a new spirit behind it, for she would not speak of her own ailings, but insisted upon getting out to rub the hands of the frozen, till Clones, seeing she was likely to faint from fatigue, put her back in the doolie.

On that night they camped below the Palári, and the next day it was crossed by the entire force.

But though the wind spared them, that day was the most trying of the retreat.

The blazing sun upon the snow after the storm had produced a rapid increase of snow blindness. Of the English officers Terrington alone was unaffected, the others all having to be led, Walcot especially being much disfigured and in great pain.

The blinded men went hand in hand in single file with a leader who could still see the track to each squad of ten, the skin of their faces blistered and bleeding, their eyes crimson and inflamed, and tears trickling continuously from them, to freeze upon their cheeks.

At a height of twelve thousand feet each movement was a struggle, and, from ceaseless fighting, marching and want of sleep, every nerve and muscle were at the breaking point. Gale, blind and worn out, but cheery as ever, facing a fight which he could not see, kept the rear-guard in splendid shape, and Clones, though blind also and suffering from frost-bite, continued to feel his way among the wounded.

The faith of all was pinned desperately upon Terrington, and keen the anxiety about his sight. It was perhaps sheer determination which kept him as impervious to the glare as to fatigue.

Tired out he was, and knew he was, but he seemed able to hold his tiredness at arm's length for so long as he was needed.

By evening the last man was clear of the pass; the enemy had not dared to cross it, so the British force was practically safe from pursuit, and on the morrow would be dropping down towards the green valleys and the south. But only a few of the hardier hill-men had energy to kindle smoking fires of the wet brushwood they were able to collect.

Terrington had gone round the camps to say a cheering word to the men and see if all that was possible for the frozen and wounded had been done; and at last, his task ended, turned with foreboding to the green tent, which Gholam had pitched warily in a crevice of the rocks.

In the supreme effort of that crowning day he had not seen Rose since the night before, when she had seemed achingly weak and ill.

She was sitting on the mattress, all her rugs piled about her, shivering. She burst into tears as he knelt down beside her.

"My feet are frozen," she sobbed, "my feet are frozen."

He had her boots off in an instant, and set the lantern on the ground, searching anxiously for the fatal whitening of the flesh. But though her feet were absolutely numb the frost-bite had but just begun, and half an hour's vigorous rubbing took the whiteness out of them; and then Terrington chafed them gently, and breathed on them, and wrapped them under his coat to bring the blood back to them as imperceptibly as possible while Rose sat with hands clenched and face working, smiling at his tenderness and crying with pain.

But in that torture of recovery she reached her limit of endurance. The cold had sunk into her soul, and when Gholam brought in the smoky lukewarm mess, which was all that even his adroitness could contrive in that white waste she turned her head away from it, saying wearily that she did not want to eat.

Terrington, with a sense of difficulty beside which the leading of men was a simple matter, sat down on the mattress beside her and put his arm supportingly about her shoulders.

"I'm going to feed you," he said.

She tried to meet his mothering with a smile, but as the flap of the tent lifted with a blast of wind, which flung a spray of snow over them, she shivered and shrank back, shaking her head.

"It doesn't matter if I eat or not," she said despairingly. "I can't live another night with the cold. I wished I could die all last night, it was such dreadful pain. I can't stand it any more."

For answer he drew her a little closer to him.

"God's brought us to the end of our trouble, child," he said. "To-morrow it will be all going down, down, down, and warmer and warmer every hour. You've only to make a fight of it just this one night more—for my sake," he added.

She shook her head despondently, but he thrust his fork into the dish, and brought a morsel of meat to her mouth, and made her eat it. And so, coaxing and commanding, he forced a meal upon her, eating one himself to give her time, and she leant against him with her head upon his shoulder, faintly happy, but shivering at every blast that pierced the chinks of the tent.

He rose when she had finished and laid her down on the mattress, wrapping her up in everything he could find.

"You're not going away?" she murmured apprehensively.

"Only to have another look at the men," he said, tucking the rugs closer about her.

"You'll come back; promise you'll come back," she pleaded anxiously.

Kneeling down beside her, he bent down and kissed her forehead gently.

"The moment I can," he said.

He tightened the flaps of the tent, and set Gholam Muhammed to pile snow about the skirts of it. Then he went on to the camp.

He found everything there very much in need of him. The plans he had made had not been completed. The men, utterly worn out, had flung themselves down too tired even to care for self-preservation.

Walcot was seriously ill; Gale, Dore, Clones, and the two senior native officers were all blind, and so were ignorant of what had been left undone.

Freddy Gale, though he had twice fallen from exhaustion, had directed personally the issue of rations, and used every chance to cheer his men; but he missed that sense of their condition, and they the sense of his control, which can come from sight alone.

They lay in the snow, inert, benumbed, certain victims to that frozen sleep from which there is no wakening. Only the old soldiers of the Guides had stretched their blankets, and made any likeness to a bivouac.

Terrington's voice came upon the scene like the call of a bugle. There was help in it and scorn and energy and command, and, behind if, unconquerable will and eyes that saw. The men dragged themselves to their feet, and straightened themselves to match its clear direction. Order after order rang out, like the voice of a ship's captain shortening sail, quick, certain, vivid with necessity, but cool as the dew. The heaps of men became ranks that took shape and moved. Rifles rose on end, blankets were slung between them, and slowly the crescent camp came into being, which should offer least resistance to and most shelter from a storm. The little hospital leanto was enlarged, the worst cases were brought in and treated, and then laid for warmth one upon the other at the end of it.

For close on three hours Terrington's labour never ceased for a second, and the camp lived upon his voice. He did not leave it till he had seen every man with some covering over him, and some food to eat; not, indeed, till maternally, he had tucked them all into bed. Then, hoarse with shouting and drunk with fatigue, he staggered back to the little green tent.

Rose turned her head as he entered, but the eyes were strange to him. He kneeled down beside her, dried the snow from his hand, and laid the back of it upon her cheek. Her skin was gray and mortally cold.

"I'm dying," she whispered.

He felt her hands, which were blue and lifeless, and with no flutter of a pulse. The air in the little tent was a long way below the freezing-point, and it was quite evident that she was slowly sinking into the torpor from which she never could be roused.

He chafed her hands, but no heat came to them; she merely turned from him with a weary gesture to be left alone. Then he pressed her palms against the talc of the lantern, but the flickering candle seemed to give out no warmth. Then, suddenly, a thought struck him with the fierce hazard of despair.

He gazed at her in doubt for a moment, then he got up, dusted the flakes of snow from his riding-breeches and drew off his long boots.

Rose turned her head away from him on the pillow with a sigh and closed her eyes. She was slipping happily away from him into the land of shadows.

Terrington took off his greatcoat and spread it over her. Then he lifted the wraps that covered her, and lying down upon the mattress slowly drew them over himself as well. She turned again, childishly fretful at being disturbed. Running a finger down the buttons of his patrol, Terrington raised himself, and taking her in his arms drew her under him, spreading his body upon hers.

Though he was heated with exertion, it was a long time before any warmth could melt its way into her chilled flesh. Terrington pressed his face against hers, first to one cold cheek and then to another, breathing, as one thaws a window pane, upon her neck. At last, when he had almost lost hope of saving her, she made a little nestling motion towards him like a frozen bird before the fire. Then her breath began to be audible, and she gave long sighs as though to free herself of his weight upon her.

Terrington's limbs were numb with the intentness of their pressure, and his arms, folded about her, had fallen asleep. The cold seemed to lie like a wet sheet over his back.

Presently Rose moved beneath him, a movement of her whole body: her eyes opened, met his without wonder, and closed again with a sigh of content. Her arms straightened, and then, loosening limply from the shoulders, slipped to her sides. She seemed to soften and grow supple beneath him and her breath came evenly between her lips. She was asleep.

Terrington raised himself slightly, and so stayed all the night.

The agonies that he suffered from cold, cramp, and the stubborn struggle with fatigue passed what he had thought possible to human endurance.

In the gray of the morning she opened her eyes again.

"Nevile!" she exclaimed, as though she had but just parted with him in a dream.

She had pushed in wonderment her hands against him, and he fell over as though his arms had been cut off. She stared an instant at his grotesque efforts to move, then with a sudden passion of enlightenment seized his useless arms.

"Nevile, Nevile!" she cried, "what have you done for me? You've saved my life."

He smiled dimly, trying to lift himself upon his elbows, but dropped back again.

"Have I?" he said.

Her left arm went like a snake about his shoulder, and her face came down quick and close to his.

"Why did you do it?" she asked almost angrily.

"I love you, dear," he said.

XII

After the night under that gable in the roof of the world, many things happened; but there ended the siege of Sar. For Sar is, in the old tongue of Maristan, the word that stood alike for the kingdom's centre, the heart's core, and this was a siege unprepared and unintended, by a girl of a man's heart. For it was to the girl that he surrendered.

The rest of the retreat, the cold neglect with which the Government of India tried to treat the little force, the angry expostulation of the Press of England, and the tardy honours, are they not written in the book of the Rulers of India, and in the heart of a people that does not forget?

But with his crossing of the Palári, Terrington's achievement ceases. The rest was mere marching. Thanks, indeed, to his diplomacy it was mere marching, and that not a sword was drawn against him on the road home. But he thought little of such success; he had a natural capacity, he said, for creating false impressions.

He came very near incapacity during the first day of the descent: for his vigil of the night before had cost him the use of both his arms and legs. Rose prayed him to be carried in her doolie, but he knew the effect the breakdown of his seemingly unassailable strength would have upon his men, and had himself tied upon the back of his little pony, and led, with no slackening for his infirmities, wherever his encouragement or his counsel was required.

The perpetual jogging down-hill was, in his condition, not a bad imitation of martyrdom, which, in his heart he bore as deserved for having spent his strength upon a woman instead of for his men.

But the power came back to his arms by the way, perhaps from sheer pain; and the use he found for them at the end of the day, when, though still in the snow, the weary little band gathered warm and happy about fires of fir, certainly suggested no regrets to the woman they enfolded.

Her Reputation

I

The man who was sitting at the writing-table had not raised his head for half an hour from between his hands.

When at last he lifted his face, after a third knock upon the door, the prints of his fingers were branded across its grayness in livid streaks.

The hall-boy who entered, after waiting vainly for permission, handed him a telegram, which he opened and spread out on the desk before him.

He stared at it blankly, with his temples upon his wrists, until the boy, tired of waiting, asked if there were any answer.

Terence turned and looked at him as though unable to account for his presence.

The boy repeated his question, and Terence shook his head, resting it again upon his hands as the door closed upon the messenger, gazing down uncomprehendingly upon the thin pink sheet.

Presently, however, the meaning of what lay before him filtered into his consciousness. It was an invitation of no moment, but it needed a reply. He drew out a sheaf of forms from a pigeon-hole, wrote a refusal, rang for the boy, and sent it off.

The incident passed at once from his mind, but it had disturbed his absorption.

He rose and paced slowly and aimlessly about the room, gazing blindly out of the window and at the engravings upon the walls. There was something curious in the combined looseness and stiffness of his movements: he seemed literally to be dragging himself about.

When he sat down again he turned his chair slightly from the table, and leaning back in it, stared out at the gray day with a look of dazed pain upon his face.

So he remained while an hour went over; as still, as empty, as a deserted house.

Then, with a deeper breath and the same confused slowness in his movements, he drew an envelope from his pocket, and spread out the sheet within it upon the desk. The lines it carried covered but a single page, and he had read them through a dozen times.

They came from a woman whom he had loved more than his own soul, and they cast him, with freezing contempt, out of her sight for ever.

He read the bitter words again, hoping their sharp edge would make a wound of self-respect in the consciousness they had benumbed. But he tried in vain to hurt his pride, or by any fresh vexation to escape from the torment of his thoughts.

Earth is jealous of its anodynes, even of pain that brings oblivion or of death that means release. He refolded the letter and returned it to his pocket, knowing that in half an hour he would be reading it again.

Meanwhile a new impulse moved him.

Leaning forward, he slid back a secret door in the top of his desk, and took from the space behind it a bundle of letters. They were in envelopes of almost every hue and shape, but all were directed by the same hand, in a vain weak sprawling character.

Terence drew the packet towards him, and set his fingers on the string.

Then with a shudder he pushed it from him, and thrust his face into his hands.

Under those harlequin covers were hidden the one chance of happiness for his life, and the reputation of a woman.

He could make them yield which of the two he chose; but the other must be destroyed.

II

It was nearly two years since he had first seen his name written in that hand, a very short while after he had made acquaintance with the writer.

She had stirred his curiosity from the moment he met her; partly by something tragic in her beauty, which was indubitable; partly by some quality which he found repellent even in her attraction. She bore a well known name, but her husband's estates were encumbered; every place he had was let, and they entertained but little. Terence had known the latter slightly for some years, and disliked him extremely. He was a man with a predilection for any sport in which something suffered, provided it could be followed in comfort; and he openly lamented having married for love—as he termed it—instead of putting up his peerage to the bidding of the States.

Terence had pitied any one who might have to do with him, and was thus already at a sympathetic angle on meeting his wife.

She surprised him by her detachment from the world in which she lived. She viewed it with vague eyes, knowing of its happenings only from what was told her, and divining neither their probability nor their consequence.

Nothing, dropped into her mind, seemed to fructify: it lay there like seed upon a rock. To Terence, whose chief resource was his ignorance, such detachment appeared incredible.

He thought her beauty of itself would have proved a sufficient link with life, or with at least the deadlier forms of it which wear the name in London. A woman with her eyes was generally enabled to foresee some of the surprises in the Book of Judgment. Men looked to that.

But it was clear to Terence that she foresaw nothing. If corruption had approached her, it had failed to get not a hearing only, but a seeing. Whatever place there might be for it in her heart, there was plainly none in her intelligence: she did not even know it by sight.

Terence guessed that from the men she knew, and by the way she knew them. She had evidently no instructive sense of a bad lot. A bad woman had that, and often added hatred to it; a good woman had it, and added pity. She had it not at all.

He found consequently no compliment in the gracious way she had received him, and no seduction in the enquiring sadness of her eyes. Since the meeting was at Ascot, and she was exquisitely dressed, he tried all the frivolous topics he thought might interest her; then some of the serious ones which interested him. She seemed about equally bored with either, and he was surprised when she asked on parting, with a curious gravity of request, if he would come and see her.

He saw her twice in town. She had named her day, but he had forgotten it and gone on another. So she wrote, finding his card, to arrange a meeting, and, after it, offered him another afternoon. Terence was on each occasion her only visitor, and surmised that he was not so by chance.

Yet he found it difficult to account for the privilege.

They seemed to have little in common, not even the tongue in which they talked. Both appeared to be translating their thoughts before speaking them.

Terence felt stupidly ineffective, and wondered in what straits of tedium she might be living on receiving, a day or two later, an invitation to spend a week end at Wallingford, where her husband had taken a summer house.

He hesitated; (to be desired despite such a show of dulness seemed almost pathetic); accepted, hoping that work would intervene; but in the end, went.

He told himself that it would be outdoor weather, a house party, and he should see little of his hostess.

It was outdoor weather; but the party had been arranged for pairing, and he saw little but his hostess.

They spent the days upon the dozing river, and sat together late into the warm nights upon the lawn.

He knew nothing about women, and did not understand their ways. Therefore he was gravely interested in the account she set before him of her groping soul.

He had never imagined any conception of existence so out of touch with reality as were her beliefs. Her idealism would have discredited a schoolgirl's fiction, and she clung to it as though there were some merit in being deceived.

Such determination to remain in the dark almost angered him.

"But men and women aren't like that," he expostulated more than once.

"That's what people are always telling me," she replied pathetically: "but why aren't they?"

He hadn't, as he assured her, the remotest notion; his interest lying, not in what men weren't, but in what they were.

He tried to impart that interest in her, but without success.

If men were the brutes they seemed proud to be, she asserted vigorously, she didn't care how ill she knew them.

But it was clear that she had higher hopes of humanity than she confessed, and it would have been clear to any one but Terence that those hopes were becoming centred on himself.

What men said of him had roused her incredulous admiration, and he seemed to dislike women as much as he respected them. His honesty, his deference, and his grave good looks attracted her from the first; his sympathy and discernment riveted the attraction. He reproved her optimism in vain; for was he not its embodiment?

Terence, unconscious of being anything but a somewhat poor companion, discussed the sentiments she suggested, growing ever more astounded by her severance from realities, and more touched by her unhappy days.

Of her husband's life he knew more than she had surmised, but she had surmised enough to make wifehood an indignity. His unfaithfulness, as a stye by which she had to live, soured for her every odour in the world. She had not the vigour to ignore it, nor the courage to escape. She had dreamed of marriage as a royal feast; she woke to find herself among the swine.

The discovery would have hardened some women into defiance; some would have sheltered with it their own intrigues; but the shock cowed in her all further curiosity in existence. If life were really like the bit she had tasted, she preferred to starve. The other men she met seemed as horrible as her husband; they had the same speech, the same jests, the same dissipations.

She shrank more and more into herself; even women revolted her by their tolerance of men's presumptions.

Then Terence came. Like a plant grown in darkness, her anaemic delicacy of thought responded with an unhealthy exuberance to the first ray of sunlight. She listened to his silences and found them refreshing; then she drew him into speech.

He spoke of much that she could not understand, but his obscurities were an intoxication, and not, as those of other men, a dread. She felt there was something wide and fine behind his words; a coherence, an integrity; she was vaguely pleased to feel it there, though its quality did not interest her at all. What did was her own expansion in the atmosphere of sympathetic confidence it had created.

Her expansiveness was, at times, distasteful to him. The secrets of a woman's moral toilet-table may be more disconcerting than those her boudoir guarded. To be discursive about either seemed to him to lack the finer reticence of life. A man's sight, if he could see at all, was a sufficient sentry to his admiration; and the little it allowed him he might be suffered to enjoy. To label the false wherever one found it would be to leave a world only fit for fools.

Terence, however, wronged her by imagining her confidences habitual. He suggested the insecurity of entrusting such things to men.

"To men!" she exclaimed, shrinking. "Do you suppose I do?"

He did; but renounced the conception penitently in view of her dismay, and lent a more consciously honoured, if more embarrassed ear. But compassion overcame his embarrassment; and he thought less often of her indiscretions than of her loneliness.

She asked him to spend a week at Wallingford when the season was over.

"I have very few friends," she said; "and no one but you has ever helped me to understand."

He wondered to what he had helped her, and whether he would recognize it if she told him; but he did not wonder if he might remit the helping; the disadvantage in the gift of oneself being that the giving is never at an end.

So he came to Wallingford again in September, when the moonlight fell nightly on white veils of mist, and the world took on a golden ripeness in the mellow silent days.

Some letters, in the meanwhile, had passed between them; letters which might have made Terence uneasy had he known what they meant. Instead, he answered them, and consigned their intentions to the chaos of feminine incomprehensibility. Some of that chaos took a shape during his second stay at Wallingford sufficiently definite and disconcerting.

It was probably only what had been put, to no purpose, in her letters, but it had another significance when spoken with rather uncomfortable pauses and lit with the intensity of a woman's very lovely eyes.

To mistake its meaning was impossible; to ignore it seemed to Terence a contemptible discretion. He could not withdraw his sympathy because it had been so dangerously misapplied, but he tried, with fraternal frankness, to abstract from it the odour of personality with which she had scented it.

He hoped to animate her with the big issues of life, but to a woman there is often no issue bigger than a man's devotion.

As they hung in the skiff beneath the birches of the mill-pond one breathless afternoon, she let him realize the fruitlessness of his intentions.

The sun that filled the drowsy air fell in dazzling patches on her white frock; there was not a sound save the dull drone of the weir, and deep in the shade a kingfisher sat motionless above the water, like a blue flame upon the bough.

She had been silent for some while after his last remark, looking away from him towards the river; then, to Terence's dismay, she leant forward, hiding her face in her hands, and began to sob.

He was paralyzed by his ignorance of any cause for tears, perplexed with self-reproaches, helplessness, and pity. It seemed equally absurd to ask why she was crying, or to offer comfort until he knew. He sat wretchedly mute for some moments, and at last begged her to let him hear what ailed her.

She did not answer till he had repeated the request, and then faltered between her sobs: "Oh, you wouldn't understand, you couldn't understand: I've got no one to care for me, no one, no one!"

He could think of no response to that which did not sound inane. He had not heard a woman cry since his sisters left the schoolroom, and no other form of consolation occurred to him than the brotherly caresses which had served him then.

Yet not till his ineptitude and apparent apathy became intolerable did he lean forward from the thwart and rest his hand upon her knee.

With the channel of that touch between them, the soothing trifles became easy which had been impossible of speech before.

Uncertain of what she might find consoling, he spoke as to a child whom he had found in tears; a murmur merely of the gentleness and pity which were in his heart.

She paid, for some time, no heed to him, but her sobs relaxed, and presently, though with her face still hidden, she laid a wet hand on his.

"Do you really mean it?" she faltered searchingly.

"Of course I mean it," he replied, wondering what his meaning was supposed to be, but resolute to stand to this poor creature for any kindness and fortitude there might be in the world.

"You're very, very good," she said; but her eyes had in them, even to his discernment, an appreciation of another sort of worth.

That was at the beginning of the afternoon; yet, though he sculled her up stream later, to taste, melting in the heated air, the moist coolness under Bensington weir, and higher, afterwards, to the "Swan" for tea, she made no reference to that understanding which was by him so little understood.

But she was more than usually silent, and there was a dream-haze across the purple depths of her eyes, which only parted when she looked at him. Then the wonderful colour seemed to flood them, and she smiled faintly in the furthest crevice of her lips, as though they had been touched by the tips of some feathery pleasure.

But to Terence that sweetness of a shared secret in her smile was immensely discomposing.

That, he recognized, when he came to look back, was the moment of warning.

At that he had his fears, never stirred before; at that he should have taken flight.

Flight was the way of men; of men timorous and importuned; perhaps, often, the only way. But he had not the courage for such a show of fear; even flight seemed to affront a woman's confidence.

A sheaf of letters at breakfast offered him that bridge of fabulous affairs over which so many a man of wider experience would have escaped. But he gave it never a thought. Where was fraternity in the world if one had to flee from the first woman who dared to claim it? He would as soon have fled from an infectious fever!

There were closer points in the comparison than he supposed—though the world does not equally admire the man who imperils the safety of his life and him who risks the peace of it—but perception of them would not have changed his mind.

He stayed because he could not go.

The morning of the day that followed was spent by every one on the shady lawn. It was too hot for even the theory of movement, and plans were postponed until the afternoon. Terence had meant to sketch a piece of stonework at Ewelme Church, but found himself engaged by his hostess to drive her to Nuneham.

Whether she intended to go there or not, she pleaded the heat as an excuse for deferring the start till it became too late to make one.

They had tea in the little Doric shrine that overlooked the river, and she took him afterwards up to the wood that rose behind the house.

Seated on a stile within it, against which he leaned, she told him the dream with which her eyes had been clouded the day before; told it with a hesitating persuasiveness which made dissent seem brutal; the dream of an ethereal alliance to which the man should bring a life, and the woman a use for it.

Terence listened stupefied as the naïve unsteady voice made out its astounding offer. She had gathered somehow his desire for such a thing; the magnifying power of her vanity must have revealed it in all he did and said. And her abysmal lack of humour concealed its grotesque disparities. He, so it seemed, was to contribute his existence, and she, a smile.

But if its seriousness was an absurdity, its absurdities were serious. Terence heard them with grave lips; heard in them, too, the diffident whispers of his pity swollen by her fancy to a blare of passion.

It was serious enough as she sounded it, and sad enough too. Disillusionment, even the gentlest, seemed out of the question.

How, to a woman who rides, triumphing in his devotion, through the barriers of her decorum, is a man to say, "I do not love you"?

There was nothing less that could be said: nothing less, at least, that was not a lie: for less, to her ears, would have said nothing. Love alone was her warrant, her title; and she had thrust his love into her helm.

There could be no other disillusionment but to take that from her, and to take it from her was to drag her to the dust.

So Terence listened. The bronze stems of the hazel saplings shone before him like prison bars, but he nodded now and then as she spoke her faith, and gazed at the golden air that burned beyond them in the west.

"I've never trusted any man enough," she ended, "to tell him all that I've told you; but you've made me believe in you; I don't know how. I suppose it really is because you're good and true. But are you quite, quite sure I mean so much to you, and that caring for me won't spoil your life?"

"One never knows what may spoil one's life," said Terence gravely "and seldom what may spoil another's; but I think it's true that you may trust me, and I'll try to be to you the friend that you desire."

He gave her his hand with boyish candour; and she held it, saying nothing, and not looking into his face.

When she released it, presently, she slid from the stile; and, turning, faced the sunset which had gilded his hair.

She was standing close to and partly in front of him, and so watched with him for a while, in silence, the setting splendours of the day.

Then, with a little sigh, she leaned back against his shoulder. Thus they stood some moments longer without a word; Terence braced to bear her weight; braced mentally to meet whatever might be coming, conscious of the beat against him of her quickened breath.

Then, with her dark head tilted back, she turned her face slowly towards him till it almost touched his lips.

For an instant he hated her, fiercely, impotently. The next, he put his hand gently upon her shoulder and kissed her cheek.

III

That kiss dated naturally a new era in their relations; not outwardly at first, to an appreciable extent, but with a difference immense in implication, in understanding.

Terence, forced to stay at Wallingford a day longer than he had intended, tried to put the added time to profit.

He saw that the chief danger lay in the hazy country of her expectations.

Her life had been turned upside down with joy, its dulness was on fire with an undreamed-of satisfaction; and she neither knew nor cared what might come next, so long as it kept the flame that was lit in her alive.

She lived for the unexpected, and she would show no discrimination in accepting it. Everything in that land was so new to her that no one thing seemed more alien than another; nothing had a special air of peril or of safety, of warning or of promise: all things were equally and perturbingly improbable, and supreme.

Terence realized how vague suddenly had become all her boundaries of conduct, and desired without delay to fix a frontier beyond which neither of them should go.

He would withdraw from nothing that his kiss had even seemed to promise; but he wished to put what it had not inalterably beyond her reach.

The optimism of such a hope can only be accounted for by his absolute ignorance of women; but her shyness, in a situation so strange to her, seemed to justify it while he remained at Wallingford.

But later, as her letters began to multiply, he realized how profound was his mistake. She rode her fancy wherever it led her, and he might as well have tried to fix a frontier for the north wind.

She wrote persistently of his love, of its greatness, its gladness, its splendid illumination of her life.

Her exultation in a thing which had no real existence was terrible to Terence.

Her dull unhappy being was transformed by a miracle as wonderful as that which creates the glory of painted wings from a withered chrysalis.

And he had wrought it. He, by some ignorant magic, had set her life afloat on pinions frailer and more resplendent than a butterfly's, to touch which roughly was to destroy her.

That was, of course, too brutal to be thought of. He must accept what he had done, however little he had meant to do it; must trust to time to dull its marvel and bring the woman back to earth.

But there seemed little likelihood of that at first, and with the increasing rapture of her letters Terence grew ever more dismayed.

Yet if he tried to lure her down to sanity, an agonized reply would be flung at him by the post's return, only to make his fears more vivid, and to compel from him, in sheer abasement, an expression of sentiment which he not only did not possess, but would have shrunk from possessing.

"Swear," she had written, not once, nor twice; "swear that you love no other woman; that you have never loved another woman; that I fill all your thoughts!"

Those were easy oaths, and true; but they did not content her. It was not enough that no other woman had a lien upon his past: his whole existence must be proscribed for her.

"Tell me," she prayed, "that I shall be everything to you always! It kills me to think that any love could move you after mine. I cannot have renounced my pride, my honour, my self-respect, for less than that."

He could but smile unmirthfully at her renunciations. His were privileges, it seemed, to her thinking, that any man might sigh for; though apparently they were to include a monastic seclusion from the world of sense, a virginity devoted, not to her passion—and for passion a man might be content to live or die—but to her sentimental fancies.

"Say," she pleaded, unsatisfied by his replies, which to such extortionate demands could be but vague, "say that I alone of all the women in the world can ever satisfy all your longings; that it would seem a degrading sacrilege to let any other woman come after me even in your thoughts! Tell me, even though I die, that my memory must keep you true."

He gazed at that for a day to get his breath, but the delay was all too long for hers.

"Write, write," she panted, on the morrow; "I cannot live unless I hear from you. Have you no feeling for a woman's dignity that you can give me over in this way to its scorn? I fling everything that I possess before you, and you find it not even worth acknowledgment."

What could he say? How could he answer her? Her blindness was sublime, detestable, ridiculous, as you were pleased to view it; but to blindness one could never refuse a hand.

Distressed by a necessity of which he had been the unwitting cause, Terence extended his. But his ignorance mitigated his foreboding; he still trusted to time.

Time, however, brought him but little comfort. If her letters became saner, it was only since he had thrown her insanity a sop. When they met a month later his difficulties were increased.

At first she had entreated him to win her respect by a display of repression.

He was to be as other men were not, to keep her staunch by an undreamed-of virtue. The lover's heart must animate to her perception only the unimpeachable kindness of the friend.

She had her wish, but had it, perhaps, in a perfection for which she was not prepared.

She seemed determined to leave no doubts as to his fortitude. She hung upon him so literally that he had to exert not moral fibre only to support her.

She drooped like a wreath about his shoulders, while he gazed, grim and ashamed, upon her hair.

But she drew no consolation from his strength. It was not strength, she told him, but indifference; she had asked for a sentry, and he had given her a statue.

She tried to soften the statue by every feminine artifice, even, at last, by kissing its irresponsive face.

He, invincibly simple, smiled at the wiles he thought were used to try him; and stiffened himself into the pose he had been convinced was her desire.

If it ever had been, she outlived it before long. Its end was advertised by an hysterical outbreak, which Terence never could recall without a shudder.

They were both, at the time, in town, where they met two or three times a week, and he had called to bring her some tickets.

She was sitting on a lounge in a remote corner of the room, and gave him her hand with blank indifference.

Unequal always to resolve her moods, he sustained a monologue from the fireplace on the trifles of the hour, until her persistent silence compelled him to ask its cause.

She replied listlessly, after some pressing, that it must be of no importance since he could ignore it.

She had merely been deceived in him, that was all: a common thing with a woman. He had proved himself to be just a man, like every other; and not the man of men she had supposed him.

It had amused him, no doubt, to win her love; now, it seemed, he was tired of it.

He had spoilt her life, he had destroyed her faith; but such things, of course, weren't worth mentioning: the great matter was, naturally, that a man should not be bored.

Now, she supposed, they might as well end the farce between them, so that he could amuse himself elsewhere. All she had lived for was over for ever, and she did not care what became of her.

She poured out the indictment to his bewildered ears in the level tones of utter apathy; but when it was done she flung herself violently across the head of the lounge in a tempest of passionate tears.

Terence, despairing of any further fitness or sanity in the affair, resigned himself to the situation with a sigh, and knelt beside her for an hour, until she appeared to draw from his caresses a renewed confidence in life.

He left her, sufficiently depressed himself, and expecting anything but a letter which reached him on the morrow by the earliest post.

It must have been written very shortly after his departure, which she had done her utmost to delay, yet it proclaimed her as too shamed by what had happened ever to meet him again, unless he felt himself strong enough to prevent such scenes in the future.

Feeling strong enough for nothing, he left her letter unanswered for a day, and received, on the next, eight pages of aggrieved reproaches for having forsaken her in the hour of her greatest need.

That was but the prelude to many meetings of as strange a kind. He never knew in what mood he should find her, nor in which she might wish to find him.

He believed her revulsions of propriety to be sincere, but felt she had no business with so many, especially since he offered her every assistance to avoid the need of them. He respected her for the first, pitied her for the second, endured the third in silence, and then began to hate them.

He did not expect a woman to know her own mind, but he thought her ignorance might be more agreeable.

So passed what was for Terence a very melancholy winter. He bore it with a resignation nerved by the near prospect of escape to a berth in Paris, which had been as good as promised him when it became vacant. Meanwhile Downing Street saw more of him than usual, and he took every opportunity of immersing himself still deeper in his work.

The post he had been expecting became available in March, and, too modest to urge his claim or to remind his patron, he was mortified to find one morning that it had been filled by another.

He accepted his ill-fortune silently, and only learnt a month later to whom he owed it.

He was enlightened then by accident, the peer, in whose gift the appointment practically lay, happening to express a regret that Terence had not seen his way to accept it.

"To accept it!" he replied, laughing. "It wasn't offered me."

"It wasn't offered you," said the other slowly, "because a certain friend of yours told me you had determined definitely, for the present, not to leave England."

Terence met the speaker's searching glance, which smouldered with admonition.

"I see," he smiled. "My own fault entirely."

He understood to whom the "certain friend" referred, as well as the warning against feminine influence in his chief's eye; and, for a moment of sick disappointment, he burned to confront the woman who had betrayed him with his knowledge of her perfidy, to fling this piece of unimagined baseness in her face, and so be rid of her.

But he realized ruefully within an hour that no such release was possible, at least for him. She had but done this thing to keep him near her.

She would plead that to stoop to such an act of treachery to the one who was dearest to her only proved how ungovernable was her love. There would be another horrible scene. She would threaten again to kill herself. And in the end he would succumb. Each sacrifice he had made for her only committed him to a fresh one. She had cultivated weakness in order to revel in his strength; he had pauperized her with his soul. Had she been a woman of rages, of pride, of resentments, it would have proved another matter; but how was it possible to hurt a thing that clung about one's neck.

So he said no more of his discomfiture, bitter as it was to his ambition as well as to his hopes of freedom. Her querulous exactions had already alienated his sympathies, so that it was no harder now to be kind to her than it had been before.

And he was glad to know definitely what he had to fear from her, even though the definition was so inclusive. He determined to loosen, slowly and gently, those tendrils of sentiment by which she clung to him, which were so enfeebling her self-support.

But he saw that he had little to hope for save from time and the natural infidelity of her sex.

IV

Time, unfortunately, seemed arrayed against him, for it was in April of the same year that he met Miss Lilias Anstruther.

Their meeting summed up the possibilities of love at sight. He loved her as she passed him on the stairs, and she him, as she afterwards confided, while he was being led to her for introduction, an occasion which has—for an Englishman, at any rate—small opportunities of display.

But love at sight is such a miracle to the seer that he never imagines its duplication. Terence saw nothing on Miss Anstruther's features but the attention an intelligent woman might show to any man with a name in the making.

She imagined, in the stern set of his, boredom at having to make himself agreeable to a merely pretty girl.

There was, in his mind, no doubt, enough to complicate a glance of admiration, since he saw between him and her the jealous presence of another woman.

What that presence meant to him, now, he realized with despair.

He had endured in silence its unscrupulous intrigues; he had schooled himself to meet the most preposterous of its requirements. But then he stood alone; the worst that could be done him was the most that he need fear. He could live secure since only he could suffer.

Now! He lost his breath as he thought of it.

He saw Lilias several times that month. He did not notice that it seemed easy to see her. That she had a hand in that facility would have been the last thing to strike him.

Love had come to him in the extravagant splendours it only wears for those who find it late, with the eyes still unsoiled through which youth sought it. For, to the boy, love is only a white angel, but the man sees it iridescent with the colours of his accumulated years of hope.

It was not surprising that Terence, who had never even imagined himself in love before, and whose every instinct forbade a paltering with its substitute, should have been overwhelmed by this putting forth of an enchantment he had long ceased to expect.

He kept his head from early habit, which made the danger of losing it in Miss Anstruther's presence almost a delight, and he banished the acknowledgment of his happiness from every part of him but his eyes.

There, however, in the glow of an accustomed kindliness it could escape recognition, and there too it was often absorbed in a stern anxiety when he faced the risks of its discovery by the other woman.

From her he kept, with a man's timorous diplomacy, every echo of the girl's name, until he learnt they were acquainted. Then he had to endure an inquest on his concealment, and the woman's suspicions were fertilized by his replies.

They found food for growth later on in what she was pleased, perhaps rightly, to imagine a preoccupation in his manner.

She was, of course, aware of his effort to dilute what was emotional in their intercourse, and to replace it with a tender and unashamed fraternity.

Of that he made no secret; and she made very little of her resolve to thwart it.

He had but small success but more than he expected. He declined several invitations to Wallingford during the summer, where she had again a house; and when he went in August, found her, thanks partly to the persistence of some exacting and undesired guests, more malleable than she had ever been before.

He had been so attentively kind to her during the season that she found no excuse to upbraid him, yet she showed by a dozen disdainful poses how fiercely she resented his determined friendliness.

Meanwhile he had seen little of Lilias. His devotion to her was too sensitive and too entire to allow him even to offer her his company while he had still, however occasionally, to bestow his kisses on another woman. That woman too was still a moral charge upon him, and a source beside of incalculable danger.

What she would not do was clearly not everywhere conterminous with what she should not.

He had sufficiently realized that his happiness would never appeal to her apart from hers, and that there would be a stormy finish where hers ended. But he still trusted in time, and was satisfied with the slight progress towards reasonableness in their relationship.

Her letters continued to upbraid him with his neglect; but they began to hint at a reciprocal attitude.

She too, they threatened, could be indifferent; the time might come when to his appeal there would be no response.

Terence prayed devoutly for that day to hasten, as the months went on; and ran down in November, ostensibly for a week's hunting, to a house in Leicestershire where Miss Anstruther was staying.

Knowing the country better than he, she offered to pilot him, and took him under her charge with a delightful assurance, which allowed him no voice nor choice of his own while out of doors.

She rode straight, but used her head, in cutting out a line, to nurse her horse, and showed a most unfeminine appreciation of distances, save when the hounds were running late away from home.

During the long easy amble homeward in the dusk, on such occasions Terence might have been led to doubt that it was inadvertence which had secured him so much of her company, had he not arrived at conclusions of much greater moment.

To have found, at thirty-five when such discoveries are being despaired of the woman for whom his life had waited for whom, unknown, it had worn its innocence untainted, was sufficient of itself to monopolize his thoughts.

In her presence he became young again; young in interests, in expectancy, in purposeless energies. The whole desire of the man was in focus for the first time in his life.

Lilias gave him her company but no other sign of liking; yet her company was of itself sufficient to make him insanely content.

Still his fears made him cautious. The prize was too great, the thought of failure too consuming, to admit of risk.

So he let the winter go without a word to her of what was eating out his heart, using what chances offered for seeing her, but making none that might attract comment, and all the while attenuating the link that bound him to the other, and trying to accustom her to do without him.

He seemed in that to be making headway.

She wrote more and more rarely to him, and never in the expansive fashion of the past, and if he kissed her on parting, as occasionally she insisted, it added no warmth to his farewell. Yet he still misdoubted her, and would not have put his fortune to the touch had Fate not forced his hand with the announcement that Miss Anstruther was leaving for India in the spring.

He looked in vain for ways to stop her, but shyly, and conscious of a new distance in her manner, as though she thought his interest might be more explicit.

On that he spoke. Her evasions, chilly with the disdain of every honest woman for a philanderer, were intolerable. He saw the risk he ran either way of losing her, but chose that which gave him, at any rate, fighting chances, and told her of his love.

Three days followed in the blue of heaven; then he came back to earth, and took up his trouble.

The other woman was at St. Raphael, so he had to write. He would have vastly preferred to tell her face to face what he had done. He had no courage for a fight in the dark; he wished to see the blow come back, and meet it. But there were reasons insuperable against that.

He expected an intemperate reply, but nothing so wildly bereft of reason as that which reached him. It was shrill with threats which turned his blood to ice and then set it boiling with indignation; threats which seemed to echo from some shrieking purlieu of the Mile End Road.

Her soul revolted, she wrote, at what he had done. He had thrown her away like stale water. His selfishness had made her life unbearable. Her pride, her capacity for caring, her whole womanhood had been hurt and crushed to death.

She went about feeling there was no meaning any more in anything. He had hardened and embittered her nature to a terrible degree.

He had hurt her so unendurably that it didn't seem to matter how she hurt others.

Love and truth and honour had become a farce, and loyalty was an unnecessary scruple.

She ended by saying she did not know how long she could go on bearing it in silence. The only fair thing seemed to be to tell Miss Anstruther everything that had happened, and let her judge between them.

Despite the sense of his integrity, and a dreary memory of the months devoted to her whims, Terence almost felt himself to be, as he read her impeachment, the unspeakable brute that she described.

He even tried to excuse her horrid and unexpected forms of speech; the clamour, the invective, the dismal absence of reserve. If she had overleapt the bounds of decency he had given her the impetus, and to be startled by such an exhibition only argued his inexperience.

Yet even his generosity could not acquit her. He remembered her repeated wail, "Tell me I haven't spoilt your life!"—a cry which no ardour of his assurance seemed able to satisfy. Well, now she had the only proof that could appease her conscience, and this was the result. He showed her that his life was still whole, and she itched to break it beyond repair.

His resentment quickened. Surely it was more than should be asked of a man's benevolence to sacrifice his life to no purpose for a woman's mistake.

He wrote urgently, and as he thought in reason; but the letter read to her as a wrathful menace. He had explained that in trying to hurt others she might hurt herself the more, since to alienate Miss Anstruther would be to make a lifelong enemy of himself.

She replied in such spiritless dejection that he had to try to comfort her. She asked why he had been in such a hurry to supersede her; and though his patience of many months seemed to him misnamed as hurry, he explained the circumstance which made him speak.

Many letters passed between them: letters coloured on her part by a childish irresponsibility and persistence, and on his by an attempt, a fatal attempt, to treat her as a child, and to let her hug the little salves to her vanity which she invented daily and submitted piteously for his confirmation.

Terence discovered, when it was too late, that sooner than allow that any one could supplant her in his affection, she had pictured his proposal as a man's heroic sacrifice of himself to a girl's forwardness, and his letters had unconsciously confirmed her fatuous invention.

Consoled by it, she wrote to Lilias a letter of congratulation, and her correspondence with Terence grew heavy with the odour of a shared and precarious secret which she, at least, would make honourable pretences to ignore.

Terence, at his wit's end for peace, capitulated to her self-complacent theory, after a half-hearted attempt to take it from her.

To destroy her faith in it seemed needlessly unkind, seeing how much her faith in everything else appeared to be bound up therein. And if her comfort in it was false, false it had been all along, from the days when for her sake he had fostered it. Now, at any rate, it brought comfort to them both.

He was shown the letter Lilias had received from her, and thought his danger at an end. Yet he went softly, not daring to own the intensity of his happiness even to himself. He tried to keep the joy of it from his mind, to walk humbly as a mortal should, lest the gods might grow jealous of his exulting dreams.

Yet at times, despite his caution, at the higher tides of his delight, he would laugh up in the face of heaven, not arrogantly, but with the overrunning sense of his content.

A woman's lips had breathed their ephphatha upon his eyelids, and he looked out upon a new world.

New, since her beauty, like a crystal spar, lent a rainbow border to all things beyond it. His life seemed lifted by a spread of wings at every touch of her fingers.

There was a magic in her influence, that fed from the soft reluctance of her body the fuel that burned in his. A magic on which he lived between their meetings, and for whose strange infusion he fainted while they were apart.

He told her, laughing, that he was almost frightened to be such a slave; and though she paid no heed to the assertion, it sank with melting heat into her heart, and unknown to him the girl's breast throbbed, behind its shy demurs, with a fierce exultation in the sense that swayed him.

So two months passed, the two months when even the English earth seems mad, mad with the surge of its triumphant greenness, and with the singing flood of birds that fills it from the south.

From the south, too, came, in May, the other woman, giving Terence notice of her return, and telling him that she only wished to see him if he felt a meeting was not impossible.

He replied that nothing could make it impossible but his ignorance of her address, which she had omitted to send him.

He called the day after it arrived. He had no avidity for the interview; but, seeing that he would be certain some day to meet her, thought the sooner the safer.

She received him with a curious prescribed coldness, warmed in the strangest way by glances of reproachful pity. She spoke in a compressed tone, and Terence expected that at any moment she would scream and seize him. The prevision was so strong that, on leaving her, he practically backed to the door, keeping his eye deterrently fixed upon her, as though she were some savage creature that might spring upon him if he turned his head.

She took the line throughout that, despite his perfidy, he was to be regarded with a grieved compassion; and she met his profession of attachment to the woman he was about to marry with the sad smile of a lenient unbelief.

Once or twice the raging bitterness of a soul pent up behind it threatened to engulf the passive monotony of her speech, and the dull eyes glowed as though about to scorch him; but nothing deplorable happened, and Terence breathed a deep relief as the door closed behind him and shut off, as he trusted, from his future the only danger that threatened it.

His confidence, however, did not live for long. Scarcely more than a week later something serious in Miss Anstruther's face checked him as he greeted her.

"Yes," she answered to his eyes, "there's something I want to ask you. Is it true, as you told me, that you had never loved any one before you met me?"

"Yes," he said.

"Did you never give any one cause to think you loved her?"

"Not with intention."

"But you might have without meaning to?"

"I did, without meaning to."

"Oh, you know?" she exclaimed.

"Yes," he said, "I know. May I ask how you do?"

"No," she replied; "I'd sooner not tell you that. I only wanted to be told it wasn't true."

"But it is true!" he objected.

"Oh, not what matters," she breathed. "Did she care for you very, very much?"

"She cared a good deal more than I deserved," he said gravely; "and more unspeakably than I desired."

"But she didn't find that out?"

"No, she didn't find it out. Think what finding out would have meant to her."

The girl was silent for a moment.

"Did you kiss her?" she asked, below her breath.

"I did many things I would have preferred not to," he said quietly; "but what they were you could not wish, I think, to learn from me."

"On account of what I know?" she asked.

"I don't know what you know," he replied; "but I think that no man who has shared, however unwillingly, a woman's secret, has any rights over it but those of burial."

She gave him her lips with a smile, and made no further reference to the subject before they parted. She was going into the country, and he was not to see her for ten days.

He spent some part of them wondering idly whence her information had come, but he was in no mood to make enquiry where it might have been effective, and had put the question from his mind, when, at the end of the week, he received from Lilias a feverish note saying that everything between them depended on his reply to something that she must ask him. Would he let her know the first moment he could come.

He named the next morning, but, when leaving his rooms on the way to her the letter was delivered which changed the face of the world for him, and hung the future on his choice of an alternative.

The letter was short, and passionately scornful. It admitted no challenge, no reply. She had seen, it said, all he had written to the other woman, and she despised him so utterly that she felt no pain in parting from him for ever.

That was all. Yesterday he held for her all the beauty and the savour of the world, to-day she loathed him as a leper. In an hour she had repudiated the most sacred convictions of her soul.

She had learnt his fineness at every turn of his thoughts. Her spirit, that had touched his at first so timidly, had come to seek with passionate security its most intimate caress. There was nothing she had not revealed to him, no shame so sweet nor so secret which she had feared to let him know.

And now!

"If I had loved a devil unawares," reflected Terence sadly, "I hardly think I would have cast her out like that. Love should not, for its own dignity, degrade so easily what it has ennobled."

Yet not for a moment did he resent the ruthlessness of her letter. His love had indeed exalted her above possibility of that.

He had lost her! It was of nothing less that he could think. For some while he did not even wonder how the astounding change had come. Her brief note said nothing; nothing of what had happened in that momentous fortnight, nothing of the source of her enlightenment, nothing even to excuse the feeding of her suspicions on letters of his which were not addressed to her.

It left, indifferently, everything to his conjecture; but conjecture was not difficult.

The tragic ending of his hopes was the outcome, he had little doubt, of his last visit to the other woman. She saw him then as hers no longer; saw in him too, perhaps, in spite of his concealments, a radiance which her love had never wrought, and realized, with cruel clearness, how entirely he was another's.

And so, inflamed with jealousy beyond endurance, she had determined that no one should possess him if she might not, and had used her pain, malignantly, to poison the other's pleasure.

That poison took no doubt at first the form of hints; a woman's pitying innuendoes, which had roused the girl's suspicions and been the cause of her demands. And when she repeated his disclaimer, further proofs, he supposed, were mentioned, and finally the letters had been produced.

As the story of those two short weeks took shape in his mind—the profitless destruction done to his life and to another's by a woman's venomous malice—he could, in the fierceness of his despair, have made an end to her with his naked hands.

At that, ashamed of himself, he smiled, remembering the frequent vaunting of her pride and the affectations of her honour. This was strange work for either of them. But then a woman's honour was so detachable.

She had it if you had it; and if you hadn't it, neither had she. In that way her morality never placed her at a disadvantage. She could always be as noble or as mean as her opponent.

He smiled again, more grimly, to think that on him of all men such a fate had fallen. That he who all his life had shrunk from women should be execrated as a philanderer! Surely ironic comedy could go no further?

And to consider, beside it, the kind of man, for whom London is too small a harem, wedded gratefully, reverently, every day, by the kind of woman who found him unworthy, the kind of man, alas! to whom all too probably, to appease that terrible vanity of a trumpeted indifference, she might fall: to the first brute who desired to possess her.

Her fineness would not save her! Had it ever saved a woman yet from such a fate? By the blaze of his wrath he seemed to see the reason.

Woman had no fineness, no sensibility, no subtlety of discernment. Her fastidiousness was an affectation, like the cut of her skirt: she wore each because it was the fashion. It was made for her, not by her, and was no part of her at all.

But his anger could only for an instant find fuel to feed it in the woman he loved. It turned at once against the other, and his thoughts turned with it to her letters, the only bond between them which remained.

They formed the packet of many coloured papers which at last, blind with scorn to their sanctity, he had drawn from its secret place.

He had kept them without defined intention; certainly with no premonition of needing them in his defence; so far as he could remember, only to remind himself how that strange disturbance of his life had come about.

But now, as his anger burnt the better part of him, he saw another use for them. They alone could justify, could extenuate what he had done. No man who had endured an undesired love could read them and condemn.

But a woman? That was another matter. And a woman, too, who had adored! How would she read their raving violence?

Would she believe that the woman who wrote so wildly of the surrender of herself had never dreamed of giving him more by it than her lips.

He wondered. Women were so hopelessly ignorant of one another. So unable to conceive as womanly any qualities but their own; so unable to believe even in the existence of a compulsion which would not move themselves.

Well, whether she believed or not, whether she would divine and forgive, or be confirmed in her contempt, there remained no other way to move, nor even to approach her.

It was horrible to have received such letters from a woman one did not love, more horrible still to use them in one's defence. But she had left him no alternative.

It was through her offence that he came to be fighting for what was dearer than his life. Was any right left her to complain of his weapon?

Besides, as he assured himself, he would only be enlarging a story which she had told: it was her tongue, not his, that had proclaimed it. And whether happiness or despair came to him from the event, it could at least bring her no change of fortune.

But with the very assertion of her security came apprehension from a possibility he had not foreseen.

What if Lilias, finding that those letters in no way absolved him, but proved the woman guilty of an unforgivable perfidy, should turn vengefully against her the secrets which they held?

The fear swept clear his clouded honour. Here was he answering a woman's baseness in the very fashion he had impeached as her habitual use.

He was fighting her malicious treachery with a betrayal as infamous, and which could be no whit excused by hers.

The sacredness of such letters could not be altered by circumstances; love had written them for love's eye only, and they must be held inviolable though love turned to hate.

And it was not only his personal honour that restrained him, but the honour of love itself; the silence, the gravity which every great service imposes upon those who have borne it; the duty of handing down unsullied, unspoken of, the proud name the brave tradition to those that come after.

It was because Love had indeed touched him with its sceptre that he could shield in silence one who had worn its name unworthily even while under it she had stabbed him to the heart.

He laid his hand upon the packet to return it to its place. Then, with sudden hesitation and a rueful smile at the sense of his own weakness, he rose and carried it across to the grate.

He laid it on the coals and lit a match beneath it; and, as he turned away again towards the window, heard in the blaze his hope and his despair together flame indifferently to the sky.

The Measure of a Man

I

The light shore breeze of a September morning was dying out across the bay. The wide Atlantic beyond it seemed flat as a floor of sapphire inlaid with pale veins of green. The sky was without a cloud; and the sun filled the unstirred silence with a clear golden heat.

The high gray cliffs that held the bay, hid, at either end, the land beyond it; half hid even, by a curve of their contour, the entrance to Ballindra River, so that no sign of habitation was to be seen along the shore.

The blue spaces of the sea were empty, save for a little lug-rigged boat which had slipped out of the river while the mists still slept upon it, and had spent the morning creeping with each soft breath of air to the northern border of the bay.

It was now close to land, so close that the object of its journey could be plainly seen.

Before it, cradled, under the cliffs, between the serried ledges of rock, was a tiny beach.

It was in shape like a young moon, paved in silvery pink and pearl by milk-white pebbles and delicate shells, with shelving wings of stone thrust out and bent inward from either side into the sea.

The long ledges of rock were of a dark lavender, and from them a brilliant yellow weed dripped and swung in the transparent pool of purple and emerald, which throbbed softly against the pearly crescent of the shore.

East and west, so far as eye could reach, the sea pushed a sparkling shoulder against the sheer front of the cliffs. Nowhere else in the whole bay was there a foot's breadth of beach, and there was clearly no outlet landwards even from the slender strand towards which the boat was heading.

A girl with fair hair and luminous gray eyes was steering, and a man of about thirty sat upon the opposite gunwale with the slack sheet in his hand. She looked up at the flapping leech, and then with a whimsical smile into his face.

"You'll have to row in," she said.

"Not I," he protested airily; "we're going to sail."

She laughed a low contented laugh at his perversity.

"Like this?" she enquired, tilting her head at the empty canvas.

"Give the wind time," he replied, with a glance across the bay and a big indrawn breath of complete satisfaction; "we've the whole day before us."

"We haven't the whole channel, though," she said, nodding to starboard, where a black fin of rock cut suddenly in the clear water a little whispering ring of foam.

"Phew!" exclaimed the man, screwing round on the gunwale as the black fin disappeared. "Many like that?"

"Plenty, plenty!" laughed the girl. "Are you going to row?"

He shook his head. Then, with an effect of having completely forgotten her, stared eagerly across that wavering jewel of water at the rose and silver of the beach, and down through the transparent purple depths beneath him at the sand and the rocks and the waving yellow weed.

She watched his face brighten with their beauty, as though somehow he had absorbed it, and his grave good looks take on a boyish lightness, as his eyes turned from colour to colour, or followed the sea-fern streaming in the pulse of the tide. Leaning forward with a smile she laid her hand on the cleat in front of her and let the halyard go. The brown sail ran down till the parrel jammed, and Maurice Caragh faced round reproachfully.

"Why don't you want to row?" she cried. "It isn't a hundred yards."

"No, I know," he sighed, as he freed the clip of the traveller and gathered in the bunt; "but a sail looks so much more adventurous."

"Even in a calm?" she smiled.

"Oh, yes, most in a calm," he replied, seating himself disconsolately on the thwart in front of her, and slowly pushing out a sweep. "Adventure's nothing with a full sail, but all the fear of the sea is in the flat one. Look here!" he continued, without change of tone, "the rowlocks are gone."

She thrust out the point of a little white shoe at the place where they lay beneath his thwart, and he pushed them resignedly into their chocks, and pulled for the shore; Lettice Nevern standing up with her finger tips on the tiller behind her, and her eye intent upon the channel.

Her quick emphatic directions amused the man who was rowing, as the boat wound through the invisible maze.

"Goodness!" he exclaimed, backing hard with his left, "I shouldn't care to bring a boat in here with a bit of wind."

"You couldn't," she replied, "with any wind but what we've got. That's what I like about it. There are not ten days in the year you can dare to land here. But this half tide is the worst; it's easier with less or more water."

"Do you ever come here by yourself?" he asked, resting on the oars.

"I've always come by myself," she answered, looking down into his face, "that's why"—she hesitated for a moment—"that's why I didn't bring you before."

The reason might not have seemed explicit to another, but it carried a sense of privilege to Caragh's mind that troubled the look with which he acknowledged it.

"I hope I mayn't prove unworthy of it," he said gravely.

"I don't know," she answered, with an absent glance at him: "it's a very dear little beach."

He was willing to admit, when he landed, that it might be anything she pleased to call it, but there was chiefly wonder in his eye. The bands of tiny white and silver pebbles, and of tinier pink shells, made a floor so delicate, so incredibly dainty as seemed, in that land of legend, proof sufficient of a fairy's treading.

The water lay so still and clear against it that only by the brighter tint of the covered pebbles could the margin of the sea be told, and the moving tide that swayed the weed made all along the curved strand a little whispering song, unlike any other music in the world.

Lettice enjoyed Caragh's bewilderment for a moment, but stopped him as he was bringing the cable ashore.

"You must moor her out," she said.

"Oh, no!" he pleaded, "the tide's rising, and she'll look so jolly and so impossible nosing along the shore with all that water under her, on the very edge of an ocean."

But Lettice was inflexible. The tide would be lower she said by the time they started; and Maurice had to shove the boat out again, and succeeded, after a couple of vain attempts, in jerking the anchor off her bow on to a holding bottom.

"Oh, well," he said cheerfully, eyeing the result of his labour, while he unpacked the luncheon, "she looks very well out there; only I wish I'd put up the sail."

"Are you quite mad to-day?" the girl asked.

She sat watching him with an air of grave amusement; her feet drawn up and her hands clasped below her knees. She wore a white serge coat and skirt, with a biscuit-coloured silk shirt and a ribbon of the same shade round her sailor hat. She looked much younger than her twenty-three years, though the baby-fairness of her hair and skin were sobered by the quiet depths of her gray eyes.

"I'm never mad," said Caragh to her question, holding up the red length of a lobster against the sky, "but sometimes, with you, I'm less distressingly sane than usual."

Lettice, her hands fallen to her ankles, watched him sideways, with one temple resting on her knee.

"That's the reflection of my foolishness, I suppose?" she said.

"Possibly!" he assented; "I'm very highly polished."

He was sitting with his feet towards the sea, unpacking the hamper on to a spread cloth beside him. He viewed the result appreciatively.

"Two bells!" he announced to Lettice. "We're going to do ourselves well."

His prediction, however, only applied to himself, for Lettice ate even less than usual; an amount, he had once declared, absurdly incompatible with her splendid air of health.

She offered him no assistance in clearing up, but he showed a proper sense of his privilege, by refusing even to throw the lobster claws into the sea. Lettice smiled at the chaos of fragments he insisted on repacking.

"Bridget will have ideas of your economy when she opens that," she suggested.

"She'll guess perhaps that we lunched in Paradise," he said.

They walked to the limits of it when he had finished, and sat on the outermost spur of rock.

The ocean was like glass; yet the water pulsed to and fro past them between the long limestone ledges, as it rose and fell with the breath of the sleeping blue breast of the sea.

And the tender sounds of it never ceased. Soft thumps in the blind tunnels beneath them, a crystal kiss that whitened an edge of stone, the whisper of clear rillets that ran up and tinkled down again, finding no pool to hold them; and, under all, the brushing, backwards and forwards in the moving water, of the yellow tangle of weed.

Caragh remained but a short time in the seat he had chosen. Rising, he stood at the margin of the sea, shifting his footing now and then, to scan some fresh wonder of colour, and with his ears intent on the soft complexity of sound. He seemed entirely to have forgotten his companion's presence, and Lettice watched him with an interest which became annoyed.

"One would think you had never seen such a thing before," she said.

He turned at the sound of her words, but came more slowly to their meaning.

"Oh, one never has seen, or heard, anything before; it's always different," he replied, smiling. "Just listen to that little pool emptying; it runs up a whole octave, but such a queer scale! yet a minute ago I couldn't hear it! And the comic cadence of the water in that gully, it almost makes one laugh. How old Bach would have played with it. But you don't hear?"

"Not a note," she said with tight lips; "but I've no ear."

Caragh caught the tone of grievance. He smiled across at her.

"It's sheer vanity to say that," he tossed back; "but I'll admit if your ears were smaller no one could see them."

He stepped over the intervening ledges, and they picked their way side by side to the beach.

"But it is wonderful," he continued, "that there's a whole world round us that we listen to and look at for years and years, yet never either hear or see till some strange fortunate moment." He put his hand under her outstretched arm as her balance wavered upon a ridge. "Why, this may be Paradise after all, only we don't notice the angels."

His fingers closed on her elbow as she slipped upon a piece of weed.

"You shouldn't avow it, though you do ignore me," she said reproachfully.

"Ah," he sighed, as they stepped down upon the strand, "you do no justice to my plural. I wasn't thinking of the sort of paradise that may be made by one pair of wings. All the same," he went on reflectively, throwing himself upon the beach beside her, "it isn't as an angel that I've ever thought of you."

The tide was almost at its full, and the clear deep water with its thin crystal lip, which opened and shut upon the stones, was only a yard or two from Miss Nevern's feet.

Her little white shoes were thrust out straight before her, heels together, pointing to the sky, and she leaned forward looking over them across the bay.

At Caragh's words she turned her face towards him, with the vague depths of some conjecture in her eyes, as though disposed to ask him how, if not as an angel, he had ever thought of her. But she turned her eyes again, without speaking, to the topaz hills beyond the bay.

Maurice lay a moment looking at her silent profile, then, standing in front of her, he spread out the wide white skirt fan-wise on either side of her feet.

"Now you're perfectly symmetrical," he said, contemplating her from above.

She lifted her eyes to his from the distant hills with a smile.

"It would make a charming thing in marble," he continued; "almost Egyptian and yet so immensely modern. Only some fool of a critic would be certain to ask what it meant."

"And what would you say?"

He gave the statue a moment's further consideration.

"Well, that it wasn't meant for him, anyway," he replied, dropping down again beside her.

"Could you tell him what it meant for you?" she enquired, without moving.

"Not to save my life," he said at once; adding, as if to reassure himself, "but I know."

"You could tell me, perhaps?" she suggested presently.

"Heavens, no!" he exclaimed. "You least of all. You'd think me crazy."

"Oh, I think you that as it is," she admitted thoughtfully.

He laughed, but with his eyes still occupied with the beauty of her bent figure.

He filled his left hand absently with the little shells on which he lay, shaking them up and down on his open palm, till only a few were left between his fingers. As he dropped these into the other hand, his eye fell upon them.

"I say! what dear little things!" he exclaimed enthusiastically. "Why didn't you tell me about them?"

Lettice turned her head.

"I thought you'd seen them," she said indifferently.

"They're quite incredible," he went on, too absorbed in his discovery to notice her tone; "how is it that, with an ocean falling on them here, they're not ground to gruel. They make me feel more than ever an interloper. You should have moored me out in the boat: this floor was laid for naiads and fays and pixies; for nothing so heavy-footed as a man."

"Or a woman," Lettice suggested, still seated as he had posed her, but watching his search among the pebbles with her chin against her shoulder.

"Cover those number threes!" he said, without looking up from it, picking out the tiniest shells into a little pink heap upon his hand.

"They're not number threes," she retorted; "and they have to carry me. You'd find them heavy enough if you were under them."

He glanced up quickly at the half-hidden outline of the face behind her shoulder.

"I daresay," he murmured.

Something in the manner of his agreement brought the colour into her cheek, and, perhaps to hide it, she leant over towards him, and, propped on one elbow, began to search for the little shells and drop them into his hand.

She noticed, as she had never before had opportunity, the suggestion of a fine capacity in the shape of his open hand, and the sharp decision of its rare creases.

"How deep your lines are!" she said.

He looked with enquiry at the darkened features which were bent above his hand, and in reply she raked with a nail, as pink as and more polished than they, the little pile of shells back towards his thumb.

"Oh, that!" he exclaimed, as she ran the tip of her finger along the furrow. "It's wonderful, isn't it? I never saw a heart line on any hand that filled me with such respect. Cut evidently by one of those obstinately permanent affections that make one gasp in books. Let's look at yours?"

She opened, smiling, on a very rosy palm, a network of slender lines, grated and interlaced.

"Oh, shut it up!" he frowned. "Hide it from your dearest friend. Ah, my simplicity which thought you so different from all that!"

She laughed, and screwing up her hand looked down into its little cup.

"Well," she said; "tell me what you see in it."

But he shook his head.

"I shut my eyes," he declared solemnly. "Hold it a little further off."

"I shan't," she said.

"I mean," he explained, "that a yard away it's everything that one could wish."

She surveyed her hand reflectively. There had been those who wished it a good deal nearer than that; and who had wished in vain.

"At what people call a safe distance, I suppose," she said. "I think you're very fond of safe distances."

He almost started at the touch of scornful provocation in the words and in the tone. A delightful indifference to what he was or wasn't fond of had made hitherto, by its very exclusions, so much possible between them.

"Do you?" he replied, his eyes still upon her bent figure. "Why?"

"You weren't aware of it?" she asked.

"I wasn't. I haven't been told of it before."

"Perhaps, it's only with me?" she suggested.

"Perhaps, it's only with you," he smiled. "How does it show?"

She made, with her slender nail, little moons in the sand.

"It doesn't show," she said, looking down at her finger; "one feels it."

"A general attitude of caution," he suggested playfully; "such as this."

"As what?" she enquired.

"Oh!" he said, with a wave of his hand at the enclosing wall of cliff and the empty vastness of the sea, "this teeming beach, the fashionable resort behind it, the chaperon at our elbow!"

She glanced at him with a shy smile.

"Oh, not in that way," she said; "besides you couldn't help yourself; you were brought. No, one sees it mostly in the things you say."

"In the things I say?"

"Well, no! perhaps, in the things you don't say."

"I see!" he mused, with the same air of banter, "the desert areas of omission! Others made them blossom for you like the rose? I don't succeed in even expressing things that were commonplaces with them?"

"What sort of things?" she asked, her eyes again upon the sand.

"Oh, you know them probably, better than I," he said; "being a woman and used to them."

"To what?"

"To the ordinary masculine fatuities of admiration, for instance."

"No," she said reflectively; "you don't succeed in expressing those. Do you try?"

"Not much, I'm afraid. They offend me."

"You!" she exclaimed, surprised into facing him with lifted brows, "you might have said they would offend a woman."

"I might have, years and years ago!" he replied; "but that passed with other elevating superstitions of one's youth. Since then I've observed an unpleasant variety in admirations, but have yet to meet the offended woman. No, a woman may call you a fool for your flummery, or even think you one; but she'll give you every opening to repeat the folly."

The surprise in Lettice Nevern's eyes grew more serious.

"You think a man should never tell a woman that he admires her?" she said.

"He needn't appraise her to her face like a fat ox in a show-pen! unless—oh, well, unless, I suppose, she likes it."

"And then?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Oh, then, one might say, she's qualified for the show-pen. Let him tie on the ticket."

A stain of duller red upon the girl's cheek would have betrayed some quickening of her thought, had he been looking at her, instead of out across the purple level of the sea, where, above Ballindra, the harbour hills were turning in the slanting sunlight from topaz to amethyst.

The smile of humorous toleration with which Maurice Caragh accepted half the perplexities of life had always seemed to her so completely to reveal his mind—like the pool before them, through which the light filtered to the very floor—that this dark humour of depreciation let out the sounding line through her fingers into unanchorable depths.

"I think you're a little hard," she said slowly; "women aren't vain, as a rule; at least not like that. It's their humility that makes them care so much to be admired."

"I see," he smiled. "But I don't object to the admiration; that's inevitable; only to the way it's paid."

"But how is a woman to know if you don't tell her?"

"Do you ask?" he said.

"I?" she questioned. "Why?"

"I thought the last fortnight would have taught you that," he said quietly.

Her eyes flashed upon him ere she could prevent them, and from the flash her cheeks took colour as though they faced a flame.

But she was playing with the shells in her hand again before he noticed that she had moved her head, but the tip of her forefinger trembled as she pushed the tiny pink heap across her palm.

"Taught me what?" she murmured.

"What I couldn't say," he replied, adding determinedly, as she would not help him, "how much I admired you."

She turned her face half way towards him with a little pathetic distrustful smile.

"Couldn't you see it?" he said.

Her under lip quivered as her mouth moved to answer him; then, as though afraid to trust the simplest word to it, she shook her head.

Caragh saw the quiver, and every fibre in him seemed resonant with that vibration; seemed to ring with pity and tenderness and shame, as a bell reverberates to a mere thread of sound.

The thing was happening which had never happened to him before; with which, in a varied adventure with women, he had never had to charge his soul; for, until to-day, he had not stolen wittingly a girl's love.

"I thought it was plain enough," he went on warily; "I couldn't have given my eyes much more to say."

"Oh, your eyes!" came her deprecation.

He waited a second.

"Well, you see," he temporized, "I'm shy, and I didn't know how else to say it, but I hoped you'd understand."

He let the vague uncommitting words slip slowly from him, as a man pays out a cable which he cannot make fast, with rocks astern of him, and the last fathom at any moment in his fingers. Would she come to his help, he wondered, with a laugh or a light word, or must he go on to the inevitable end.

Lettice said nothing; her glance, lifted from her hand, looked away past him absently across the bay. But in its aversion he read that she understood—more even than he asked; understood that a man may be craven enough to let his eyes do what his lips dare not. She was not coming to his help; but he might, so her silence said, jump overboard and save himself, and let her and his honour go together upon the rocks.

"Well!" he went on in lighter tones, as though to suggest their adoption, "I'm afraid my mute eloquence was wasted. Must I stoop to speech?"

The girl's eyes still gazed dreamily across the water.

"What for?" she said.

She might, as many a woman would, have left his hesitation no alternative; have given with some touch of tenderness, of reluctance, even of acerbity, that hint of the expected from which, for his honour, there could be no appeal. But she chose not to. Perhaps it was her diffidence that decided, perhaps her pride.

Anyway she left to him the freedom of his embarrassment, such as it was.

He must extricate himself, but he himself should choose how. It was clear that he had not chosen when he spoke again.

"You see," he said, with the same airy extenuation; "I'm such a bad talker that I leave as little as possible to my tongue. It is so often, to my thought, like the nervous listener who insists on supplying the last word to a sentence; the wrong word, but the word one has, out of good manners, to use."

She was looking at him now, but with no meaning in her eyes.

"That's why," he continued, "I couldn't trust it to say how ... how grateful I was for you."

"For me?" she questioned.

"You see I can't trust it yet," he pleaded ruefully. "Yes, for you: for everything about you that's so delightful and unlooked for; the charm——"

At that her eyes stopped him. He had looked up suddenly as though he felt the blaze of them hot upon his face.

"Am I in the show-pen?" she said quietly.

That settled it, he felt. Well, she had every right to her challenge; he had put it into her mouth.

It was characteristic, curiously enough, of his fortuitous nature, that, despite the unedifying fashion in which his intention had hitherto hung and veered—nosing, as it were, the wind of opportunity for a flaw that suited it—he put his helm over now with irrevocable decision.

"You've cause to ask that," he said with a smile, "since I left out the only reason that seems to make admiration speakable."

"Yes?" she asked simply. "What is it?"

He raised himself from his elbow, on to his wrist, with one knee beneath him, straightening himself with respectful homage to the occasion.

"Adoration!" he replied. "No man's eulogies can be an insult to the woman he adores."

Her eyes, brave enough before, would not meet that, and he saw the vain attempt to steady the rebellious tenderness of her lips. Their tremor touched him as it had before; his voice lost its little air of drama and dropped into the boyish plainness which so well became it.

"Please," he explained, "I should have said that first: only I didn't, because I thought you knew it. I'm not silly enough to suppose it matters whether I adore you or not, except just as an apology, the only apology for what I oughtn't to have said."

She was looking down deliberately at the hand on which she leant, and even her lips were hid from him. He bent towards her and put his hand over hers upon the sand.

"Dear," he said humbly, "it seems so idle to say I love you, that I only dare to say it—as an excuse. Will you let it stand at that, and forgive me just because of it? You needn't tell me that I have no claim, and never had the least encouragement to speak of such a thing. I know that. It's inconsiderate and presumptuous, and there's only me to blame. But some day, perhaps, you won't mind remembering that I worshipped you, and try to be a little sorry for me after all."

But what she tried, not over successfully, was to say his name. Yet her lips proclaimed it with such a tremulous appropriation as to answer all his other questions.

II

Maurice had never known an hour so disordered as that which followed his declaration. His mind was like a locomotive factory trying at a moment's notice to make balloons. It was a scene of astounding and fantastic compromises.

The attitude for the occasion appeared to be a clear high joyousness tinged with the overwhelming sense of an unlooked-for favour.

Something approaching that in appearance he did certainly achieve; enough to make for the girl the moment of its immense significance; to give it the acclamation, the splendour of crowning circumstance.

His gladness, like the colour of a flag that suddenly dyes the air with victory, brought the strangest, the most assuring tumult to her heart. She heard it, as the beleaguered hear the guns that end their siege, too faint, too happy, too amazed to answer.

He heard it with amazement too; heard in his own mouth the note of triumph, of a triumph which seemed to put an end to all his hopes, to mock with its thin pretence the lost promise of such a moment, the passionate exultation which it might have yielded him.

Yet he heard it; that was something; and, though he hardly knew what he was saying, he could read its radiant answer upon the girl's face. If he was missing the full measure of the hour—and that was to put his misfortune meagrely—she at least had not suspected it. He had that single satisfaction—but, to his schooling, a supreme one—the reflection, as he voiced it to his trouble, that he was 'playing the game.'

He was inspired to suggest tea. They had brought it with them, and, though it might have seemed a higher compliment to forget both that and the hour, it was one that Maurice had not the pluck to pay. He still felt to be an intruder to the occasion, to be sustaining what some one else had achieved. The sense of duplicity made him clumsy as a man under a load; he could not use with a lover's audacity the exquisite immaturity of the moment. The very kisses which her eyes expected left a traitor's taste upon his lips.

Action, though it was but tea-making, gave him breathing space; it dismissed, for a while at least, the most protesting part of him from service into which so breathlessly it had been pressed.

With a kettle in his hand, and under shelter of the hamper, his irresponsible buoyancy came back to him, his humorous appreciation of circumstance even when it told so heavily against himself; and his talk across the table he was spreading was only a shade too vivid to be a lover's. Its gay note was thrown up by the girl's silence; a silence lightened only by a happy nod or smile. She seemed to wish, sitting intently there, to feel her senses afloat on the invading flood of his devotion, as a boat is floated by the incoming tide.

It was for that she sat so still, unwilling by any impulse of her own, to dilute her consciousness of this strange strong thing, which crept to her very skin and carried her away, surgingly intimate as the living sea.

Maurice had set her silence down to shyness, till something in the soft rapture of her face told him its true meaning. The pathos of that and, for him, the shame of it, hurt him as an air too rare to breathe.

The thought of this woman measuring with grateful wonderment the magnitude of a thing which had no existence, but in which he had brought her to believe, wrung him with a keen distress.

And in that sharp moment of shame and pity he came very near loving her; came near enough, at any rate, to dedicate the future to her illusion.

As he knelt before her on the sand, offering her a tea-cup in both his hands as though it were some sacrifice to an idol, he realized, by the glance which accepted both the humour and the service, what a big thing he had in hand. It was big enough even, so he found before long, to hide his own immense disappointment, which shrank into a small affair beside that which she must never be allowed to feel.

He had received his discomfiture from a false trust in Fate, but hers would come from a false trust in him.

So Maurice reflected as he watched Miss Nevern trying to persuade herself that cake on such an occasion was as easy to consume as cake on any other. In that, however, despite an excellent intention, she did not succeed; and her failure, absurd as it might sound, lit in him a pride of responsibility which her "I love you" had not. Here, at any rate, was an unequivocal effect; beyond evasion he was chargeable with this; and no priestly sacrament could have so pledged his allegiance as that little dryness of her throat. She set down her half-emptied cup with the prettiest pretence of satiety, a pretence which Caragh, with the hot thirst of a wound upon him, and having already drained the tea-pot, felt it best became him to ignore.

The wind, which had died at mid-day, freshened in the shadows of the September evening, and ruffled the flat face of the water into one rich dark hue.

Along the northern shore of the bay the shade of the bluff had fallen, and made a leaden edging to the sea.

Southward the low sun blazed, a dull rose-red, against the scarp of cliff, and turned the further waters and the dim head-lands beyond them to a wine-dipped purple.

"It's as solemnly gorgeous as you could well have it," Maurice affirmed as he hauled in the boat, "and we're going out of this spiny harbour under all sail to show we take the display in a proper spirit."

There was something so boyishly absurd in his determination, that Lettice, too numb with happiness to be determined about anything, went with a sigh of abdication into the bow, and leaning over the stem-post, with her fingers through the lower cringle in the luff, called the course with the quick decision of a river pilot.

But for one long strident scrape—during which each held a breath—against a sunken ledge which the helmsman found her too close hauled to clear, they came valorously into the open sea, and Maurice, sitting over the gunwale to windward with the sheet in his hand, brought Lettice aft to steer.

He had the position of vantage, for she sat a foot beneath him, and, unlike hers, his eyes owed no attention to the sail.

She begged him not to look at her; but, feeling that observation was to her advantage, he only complied for a moment with her request.

Observation was to his advantage too; for if, with shut eyes, it was easier to remember what he had lost in his new possession, with them open it was impossible to forget what he had gained.

Only a dull man would have called Lettice Nevern beautiful, but the dullest could not have thought her plain.

She had, in its most dainty shape, that perfect imperfection known as prettiness. Distractingly pretty, most women called her; and men who were not thought easy of distraction had justified the label. She had a figure a sculptor would have prized, full, buoyant, flexible, with the grace of splendid health in every line. It was a consolation, Maurice reflected, to be able to admire an acquisition, even though one did not desire it. She had, too, an admirable temper, an eye for what became her, a dozen interests in the open air. That made for mutual accommodation, and he could imagine nothing in her which could lessen his respect.

His ignorance of women was based on too wide an acquaintance to be neglected, yet he felt sure that Lettice was no coquette.

And despite the gaiety with which her face was so charmingly inscribed, she could endure quietness—enjoy it even, as four summers at Ballindra proved.

On the whole he felt cause to thank Providence, as a man might, able to nurse his damaged limbs after an accident, that the catastrophe was, for him, no worse.

He was beginning to wonder what it might be for her.

They raced home under more canvas than one who knew the shore winds of Ballindra would have cared to carry; but neither, for diverse reasons, was inclined to prudence, and the wake they blazed across that blue-black surface was a joy to see.

Caragh's right hand went to and fro, as though it held a bolting horse, and the sheet wore a deep red furrow about his palm.

Lettice kept her eyes on her work, for, as they felt the tide-race, it took some little coaxing through the stiffer gusts to hold the boat's nose on the Head in front of them.

The wind that swept the sea was channelled by the contour of the cliffs into blustering draughts that streamed from the deep cut coombes, with spaces almost of calm between them. Slantwise across these lay their course, and as the boat leapt, like a hurt thing, at each fresh blow, Maurice could feel the quick restraint of the girl's guiding fingers.

As his arm gave with the gust, the pressure of hers upon the tiller seemed to answer it, and that sensation of swift divination and subtle responsiveness between his hand and hers was worth the risk of an upset, and Maurice only wished it were less impossible to discover if Miss Nevern shared it. He supposed not. Women, so time had taught him, were seldom sensitive to the unexpected.

As they cleared the Head, and the mystery of the river lay in the dark hills before them, Caragh came again to his senses.

"Down helm!" he said.

She woke out of her reverie, but with her hand hard over.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"Shorten sail," he said, letting go the halyards.

"You're very cautious," she flouted.

"It's the timidity of sudden happiness," he smiled, making fast the first reef cringle to the boom; "you've given me too much to lose."

She touched for an instant the hand which clipped the leech beside her, and the print of her warm fingers came like an oath for sanctity, turning to truth what had had for his own ear but a jesting bitterness: she had given him too much to lose.

"Well!" he laughed, when they were going again, as the full draught of the river laid them over, and, ahead, the orange lights of Ballindra gleamed in the cleft purple of the land, "would you like that tuck out of her skirts?"

She set her lips, as they shaved the outmost ledges of the southern shore, and came about in the banging wind.

"You ought to row," she said, smiling.

"Not a doubt of it," he admitted blandly; "you've only to say the word."

But she did not. Though the harbour was not full, there were riding lights enough upon the water to make, in that dusk, the threading of their way exciting, even without the tide under them, which hummed and jumped against the quivering anchor-chains. But she was proud of her seamanship, and of her knowledge of the river, and conscious that the man who watched her could appreciate the skill in every turn of her wrist, and the pluck which kept it steady as they grazed the great black shapes of ships, or spun about as a straining cable snapped up at them out of the dark water.

Tim Moran, the old boatman who put them ashore, had a melancholy headshake at her rashness.

"Bedad, sor, it's not meself that larned her to be so vinturesome!" he explained apologetically to Caragh as he pocketed an unlooked-for piece of silver at the slip.

"She's a wilful little thing, I'm afraid," Maurice murmured, slipping his arm in hers, as they went up into the obscurity of the shore, "and rather given to running risks in the dark."

She gave him her face for answer; and the kiss he put upon it was her seal of safety in the darkest risk that she had run.

III

It was that risk, a risk of which she guessed so little, which overshadowed the three days which had been added to Caragh's sojourn at Ballindra, and which settled, black and heavy, on his reflections when she waved him a farewell.

Lettice had driven him the bleak ten miles to the dreary little station which lay like a great gray stone upon the stony fields, and he had resigned himself to eight hours of Irish travel and his thoughts, doubting of which he would be the rather rid.

The announcement of a man's affection for a woman is regarded, to-day at least, dynamically. It is supposed to put things in motion; and it is left, very reasonably, for the man to explain what.

Maurice recognized the obligation; but he asked a breathing space in which to adjust the machinery. There was a good deal to be arranged, he said. There was considerably more than could be told a bride. His affairs, he explained, entangled by the provisions of his father's will, were beginning to adjust themselves. But his income for the present was provisional, and till certain securities had been realized and charges paid—things which could not be hurried—he would hardly know how he stood, not definitely enough, at any rate, to speak of settlements.

Lettice made a mouth at that.

"I know," he said, as he softened its displeasure, "but there's your brother!"—he was her guardian and the sole trustee of her small possessions. "I can take a shot at his first question."

"Oh, so can I," she sighed. "But when will you be able to answer it?"

"Say in six months," he suggested. "Can you have all that patience?"

She nodded, and so, quite honestly, Caragh obtained his respite; though the arrangements for which he needed it were not entirely financial.

It was, curiously enough, the very honesty of the transaction which troubled his Celtic mind as he travelled eastward.

Since he had to hide from her the real necessity for postponement, he would have preferred to hide it behind the responsible audacity of a lie; behind something for which he could feel manfully and contritely accountable.

Deception was least endurable which did not compromise the deceiver. He hated the hedging truth.

He hated more things that morning than he often took the trouble even to think about, and they were mostly phases of himself. He was conscious too, as the train rolled across the weary strapwork of stonewalled fields, of a new sensation. He felt to have left a part of himself in Ballindra, fastened there securely, yet tied to him still by a thread that seemed drawn out of him, as the weaving filament from a spider's body, which, far or fast as he might travel, he could not break. It would hold him and bring him back.

The part which he had left there was the pledge he had given, the word of his honour; a word which had been a lie at best: yet no true oath that he had ever sworn had seemed to have half its sanctity. It was her belief that made it sacred and more binding than the truth.

The proud way she wore this mock jewel, as though it were a priceless stone, shut for ever the giver's lips upon its value.

If he had once loved her he might have faced her without disgrace in the day his love had died, but there was no grace left him now but his deception. That, henceforth, was to be the high thing, the stimulating fineness of his life; and, curiously enough, it woke in him a determination, manful and tender, which no real passion of the past had been able to arouse.

It woke too, though from less tranquil slumbers, the remembrance of his mutations, the grieved conviction of instability. He, least of all men, should furnish a socket for the lamp of constancy. Of what impression, he asked himself mournfully, had he ever kept the print. It was odious, contemptible. He was sick of his inconstancy; it took the exalting seriousness from life.

But though for his fickleness he blamed no one but himself, he realized that it had been aided by his somewhat unfortunate predilections. None of the women whose fascination he had acknowledged could be considered an inspiration to stability. The very colour of their charm had a chameleon quality and his appreciation was, too often, for its susceptive changes.

Yet, had he met, so at least he told himself, some sober-sweet demand upon his constancy, he believed that, in conduct at any rate, he could have sustained it.

Well, the demand had now been made, and if he had not faced it with any furious gratitude, here was in him a humble determination to realize for one woman at least her conception of a man. That resolve had stiffened him into something approaching a romantic attitude on that fairy beach in the first shock of his unlooked-for conquest, and it sustained him now, more or less, while during the slow dull journey he reflected soberly as a conqueror on the administration of his new possession.

There was a good deal to be thought of; a good deal about him that would have to go. Economies to be effected, not in expenditure only—that was a small matter—but in life. And in life it had pleased him hitherto to be just a little extravagant. He had wasted it generously, for others as heedlessly as for himself. He had done nothing, as he was so often, so importantly reminded; but then, in a happier sense, he had done everything.

Done it with a simplicity, a gaiety, a frugality even; since, after all, it was the evanescent, the immaterial things he cared for; the goods that are never marked in plain figures and only paid for in life.

Well, there would be an end to that sort of payment, save such as went into his wife's pocket. She seemed, poor pretty thing, to swell and spread, ogreishly, between him and—if he must confess it—his most alluring interests.

Her warding arms shut out the enchantment of all the charming women in the world.

Truly, he reflected, in the matter of a woman's value, the man who, with an income just sufficient for himself, sought her hand in marriage, must seem the most determined optimist under the sun.

Yet he felt anything but an optimist when the darkness of the night gave place to white clouds of steam above the rocking oily blackness of harbour water, and he dragged himself stiff and tired from his ill-lit carriage into the blanching glare of Kingston jetty.

IV

Caragh found at his rooms, when he arrived in London, in the forefront of his correspondence, a letter and a telegram.

Both were from Lady Ethel Vernon, and had an appositeness with which their recipient could very readily have dispensed.

They had been propped against a photograph of the sender, a coincidence not remarkable considering the number of her likenesses which the room held.

These agreed in the presentment of a woman, dark and slight, with a finely carried head, deep eyes that might be passionate, and a mouth that knew something of disdain.

Caragh took up one of the portraits when he had read his letter, looked at it along while without expression, and set it down again. The letter, which bore a foreign postmark and was some days old, spoke to the writer's probable departure with her husband for Budapest, where the latter, who had been an under secretary, wished to study some question of religious politics which was to come before the House of Deputies.

It groaned at the necessity of such a sojourn at such a season, and suggested, if a hint so imperious could be called suggestion, that Maurice Caragh's presence might be required in the Hungarian capital. The telegram merely added that it was.

Caragh picked up an English Bradshaw, and after turning its pages absently for five minutes in search of continental routes, realized the inadequacy of the volume, took up his hat, and went out.

Piccadilly dozed in the September sun, with a strange air of tired quietness, inert and listless as a weary being.

A stale warm haze of sunlight filled the air, silent, unstirred, that made a misty thickness in the plumage of the trees, while from some by-street were blown pale vapours with the smoky reek of bitumen, which told of autumn's leisurely repairs.

The dust on the roadway rose about the spray of a water-cart, and beyond it rumbled a solitary bus. On the park-stand waited, driverless, a worn four-wheeler, its horse asleep; and, here and there along the forsaken pavement, desultory figures, which the season never saw there, came and went.

Caragh, on the doorstep of his club, inhaled gratefully the dormant air, which sank like an opiate into the senses. How happy if those for whose pleasure this highway rang, worn and sleepless, during the hours of June, could only imitate in their recessions the soothing passiveness of its repose.

But the reflection led him to the banks of the Danube, and so, by the Orient express, indoors. There he lunched, looked out his train, worked through his letters, and went out into the dozing afternoon.

If he had ever been before in London during its first September days he felt he had been there to no purpose. He had missed it all. The silence, the sense of space, the strange exhausted air, the curious people moving aimlessly about, like the queer creatures that sometimes take possession of a deserted warren.

He strolled vaguely through the deserted streets, out of which suddenly the inhabitants had sunk as water through a sieve. A housemaid's laughing challenge from a doorway to the grocer's boy rang round an empty square. A lean cat went softly along the pavement, yet one could hear the fall of her pads. Everywhere blinds were drawn behind the windows. The place was in mourning for a people that died annually, like seedling flowers.

Caragh drifted from street to street, amused, philosophic, in that oblivion to his own before and after of which he was so profusely capable.

When he was tired he returned to the club. Then he remembered; and, after deciding regretfully against the adequateness of a telegram, wrote four pages of penitent affection, which he hoped might read more exhilarating in Ballindra than he could pretend to find them.

With their execution his consciousness quickened, and he spent a melancholy evening at the play. Two days later he was in Vienna.

V

"Here!" cried Harry Vernon, tossing his wife a telegram he had just opened, "this is meant for you. Caragh's coming on from Komarom by raft."

"By raft?" exclaimed the lady as she caught the envelope. "What's that?"

"One of those crawling timber things you see going by," replied Vernon, gazing meditatively across the river; "it's rather the sort of thing one imagines Caragh would do: invests him with the charm of the unexpected."

His wife was frowning as she read the message.

"What does he mean by such a piece of fooling," she said petulantly, "when he knows I'm here alone!"

"Never having been married, he probably thinks there's me," suggested her husband blandly.

"Well, there's you and about twenty ill-dressed Germans who can't even speak their own language, or no one; mostly no one. It's not amusing in a place like this. When will he be here?"

Harry Vernon put his finger on the bell. "We'll find out," he said.

But they did not. The combined intelligence of the hotel was unequal to coping with the ways of a timber raft; it made obliging guesses, tranquilly ridiculous, as a concession to good manners, which, with easy indifference to distance, endowed Caragh's new mode of motion with any rate of progress between that of a perambulator and of an express train.

Ethel Vernon bit her lip as her husband drew out, with huge relish, in his profuse execrable German the ambagious ignorance of the hotel staff.

"Well," he laughed, as the last witness withdrew, "it seems you may expect Caragh any moment from lunch-time until this day month. If only these good people had named an hour at which he couldn't possibly turn up we should have known when to look for him."

"He may come when he pleases," said his wife indifferently.

"It's a way he has," remarked the other, smiling.

Lady Ethel determined before his arrival to see everything in the city which Caragh might wish to show her.

The effort would bore her considerably, but she hoped for some compensation from his chagrin. The city was, however, for the following days, almost obliterated by pelting rain.

But even that brought a measure of consolation. Ethel sat at her window, and watched the green river grow turbid and swollen under the streaming skies.

"I hope he likes his raft," she murmured grimly.

But it was her husband who on that aspiration had the first news. He had paid a visit to Vacz, and meant to return by water. On the pier he found Caragh, whose curiosity in raft travel was satisfied, and who yearned for dry clothes. They travelled by the same boat, and Maurice explained that his adventure dated back many years in design, which a chance meeting with a timber merchant at Gyor enabled him to execute. He gave an account of the raft-men, their hardihood, humour, and riparian morality.

"I see," said Vernon, amused and interested. "Pity it's not the sort of thing that appeals to a woman!"

Caragh looked at him doubtfully.

"I suppose it's not," he said.

"I mean as a reason for having kept her waiting," Vernon continued.

"Must think of something else," soliloquized the other dolefully.

Vernon laughed.

"There's always that happy alternative for a Celt. Oh, by the way," he cried, with sudden remembrance, "how's the lady?"

"Which lady?" Caragh enquired.

"The lady you're going to marry in that green isle of yours. We heard of her from Miss Persse, who'd been staying over there, at Bally—something or other."

"Miss Nevern?" Caragh suggested absently, looking across the river; he was not a man very easy to surprise.

"That's the name!" said Vernon. "When does it come off?"

"I'm afraid you'll have to ask Miss Persse," replied the other slowly; "I'm not in her confidence."

"Well, I'm sorry," the politician said. "I hoped you were going to settle down and lead an honest life."

"I've kept out of prison—and Parliament, so far," replied Caragh thoughtfully.

"Your things turned up all right, and I took a room for them," Vernon explained, as they landed at the Ferencz Jozsef Quay and went up to the hotel. "The place is so full over this religious Bill that it's hard to get in anywhere."

He went up with Caragh to see if the right room had been reserved.

"We're dining down below at seven; everything's early here. Kapitany is coming, the leader of the opposition in the Magnates."

Caragh got out of his wet things in which he had lived during the two days of rain, took a bath, and dressed. There were still two hours to dinner, and he debated for a moment if he should go in search of Ethel Vernon. Something in his remembrance of her husband's smile, however, seemed to deprecate hurry, and he was aware that the man who knew not how to wait came only to the things he had not wanted.

As he doubted what to do, he remembered vividly where he was. While he loitered, under an apricot twilight the Váczi-utcza was becoming silvered with its thousand lamps.

At that hour the brilliant merry little street would be filling, between its walls of blazing windows, across the breadth of its asphalte road, with a stream of men and women; men of fine carriage and women with splendid eyes; laughing, chattering, flaunting, flirting, strolling idly to and fro.

He would sit there again, as he had sat so often, to sip his coffee and watch the crowd.

On his way a postman, running into him, gave a fresh jolt to his memory.

There would be a letter awaiting him from Lettice! He paused a moment, mentally to locate the post-office, and to taste the curious sedate pleasure the anticipation brought. It was the first letter he had received from her, and the first of such a kind that had ever come to him from any woman. He found it in the big busy building behind the Laktanya, and, slipping it into his pocket, turned back to the gay Váczi-utcza, already filled with a piercing ineffectual whiteness under the clear rose and amethyst of the evening sky.

There, with a green tumbler before him, in a kavehaz much patronized of the garrison, he sat and read his letter, looking out absently between its sentences at the lighted faces in the street.

It was a shy sweet formal little note, not lavish of endearment, less so even than her lips had been, and with something evasive and unaccustomed about it which touched Caragh, like the shrinking of a child's hand from an unfamiliar texture.

He had completely forgotten her existence half an hour earlier, yet he was surprised to find how tenderly he thought of her, when he thought of her at all. Women, before now, had often filled his thoughts to an aching tension; he had read their letters with a leaping pulse; but he had felt for none of them as he did for this frank girl, who escaped so easily from his remembrance and had never warmed his blood.

He bought a basket of saffron roses on his way back and sent it up to Ethel Vernon. She was sitting at table when he came down to dinner, talking volubly across it to a ruddy white-haired old gentleman with a soldier's face and shoulders. She greeted him with charming animation, introduced him to Kapitany, mentioned his adventure, and wove his tongue at once into their talk. Fine manners and the tact of entertainment were traditions in her family since there had been an earldom of Dalguise, and the famous Hungarian, noting the adroitness with which she piloted Caragh's ethical opinions into the traffic of politics, thought her a very clever woman, and him a very fortunate young man.

With his own good fortune Caragh was less impressed. He had not expected that his roses would be worn, but he wished that a frock had not been selected which seemed so much to miss them.

He knew Ethel Vernon well enough to make out the meaning of her primrose and heliotrope, and she, alas! knew him well enough to be certain that he could not miss it. The delicacy of his perception had supplied her before with forms of punishment, which she used on him the more deliberately since no one else of her acquaintance was hurt by them at all. Her courtesy, which so appealed to Kapitany, seemed to Caragh like a frozen forceps feeling for his nerves. They were both of them beyond the use of courtesies, which may lead back along the road of friendship as far, and faster, than they have led forward. Her affability seemed that night to thrust Caragh back to the days spent in fascinated speculation on the advice in Ethel Vernon's eyes. He had taken it, or supposed he had taken it, in the end, and for nearly three years now she had stood for everything of woman's interest and adjustment in his life. That, for him, was a considerable stretch of constancy, for which however he took no credit. It was due, as he had once suggested, to her bewildering inconstancy to herself, which produced in her captive a sense of attachment to half a dozen women.

Her inconstancy in those three years had not, it was true, been confined altogether to herself. She had forsaken her own high places more than once or twice to follow strange gods. There were certain astounding admirations to her account for men whom Caragh found intolerable.

She found them so herself after a brief experience, and always returned to him more charming for her mistakes, with the wry face of a child who comes from some unprofitable misdemeanour to be scolded and consoled.

So, with mutual concessions and disillusionment, their alliance—never worse than indiscreet—took the shape of a serene affection. On her part somewhat appropriative, and touched perhaps on his with sentiment; yet, in the main, that rare arrangement between man and woman, a loyal and tender comradeship.

Caragh had, in consequence, cause to feel embarrassed by the news he carried.

Projects for his marriage had often made a jest between them, but neither had ever taken the idea seriously, and its development would come to her, as he knew, with all the baseness of a betrayal.

His sense of the cruelty of what he had to tell her endued him with a strange numbness and indifference to the fashion in which during dinner her hurt pride stabbed at him under the caresses of her manner. Beside her just resentment, this irritation because he had dared to keep her waiting seemed not to matter. He was so sorry for all she was to suffer because of him, that no lesser feeling seemed to count. He listened to Vernon's politics, to Kapitany's eulogy of fogash, but he was thinking only of what he had to say.

After dinner the Hungarian carried Vernon off to the club, and his hostess offered to keep Caragh until her husband's return.

He followed her upstairs to her sitting-room, and out on to a little balcony which overlooked the Danube.

The night had in it still the soft warmth of the September day, but the sky was dyed with violet, in which the stars were growing white. The river swept beneath them in a leaden humming flood, and beyond it the Castle and Hill of Buda stood black among the stars.

Ethel dropped into a low cane chair, and Caragh, seated upon the balustrade, took a long look at the darkening air before he turned and spoke to her.

He knew that an explanation was expected of him, reasonable, but not so reasonable as to evade reproaches; and an apology, not humble enough to be beneath reproof. He tendered both; and if they left his censor with quite false impressions, that, he reflected ruefully, came of the perverse requirements of a woman's mind.

Looking down at her lifted face below him, pale under the purple heaven as though penetrated by the night, and still estranged, despite his pleading, over so trumpery a cause, he wondered how much, because of her beauty, woman had lost in understanding.

Beauty Ethel Vernon had in its most provoking, most illusive form. It came and went like the scent of a flower, left her passive and unpersuading, or lit her radiantly as a kindled lamp.

Even the shape of her spread skirts in the chair beneath him had in its vagueness something, some soft glow of sense, which made it expressive, and which made it hers. And he was anxious for peace, for peace at any price, from such a needless strife. What he had to tell her would be hard enough any way; but it was, at all events, something with the dignity of fate. He could not speak of it while fighting this little foolish fit of outraged pride, and he would not speak of it while his tidings might seem to be touched with the malice of his punishment. For one moment he was tempted to let this idle quarrel grow into a cause of rupture—so easy with an offended woman—and thus be spared speech at all. It would be easier, more considerate for her, inclination told him, and ah! so acceptably easier and more considerate for himself. But the temptation was not for long. In all his unprofitable vacillations he had shirked nothing to which he had set his name. The only chance to get square with folly was, he knew, by paying the price of it, and the one gain possible in this worst of his blunders seemed to be its pain. He would go through with that.

Yet, though he had his chance that evening, had it thrust upon him, he did not take it. There is a limit even to one's appetite for pain.

But he made peace, having swallowed his scolding and admitted that the ways of men were mad. The talk turned to easier topics, and he looked with less apprehension at the silken shadow in the chair.

Then, with a sudden air of remembrance, Ethel put the question which had clung for hours to the end of her tongue.

"Oh! by the way, am I to congratulate you?"

"Well, I don't know," he said. "About what?"

"Oh, that's absurd!" she exclaimed with a nervous laugh: "Isn't there a Miss Nevin?"

"Two or three, I daresay," he conceded.

"Miss Persse only mentioned one," she said, looking keenly at the dark silhouette of his figure perched on the iron trellis among the stars. "But she wrote that you could tell us a good deal about her."

"I can," he allowed serenely; "she's a charming creature."

"Sufficiently charming to be charmed by you?"

"So I flatter myself," he said. "I don't know even that I wouldn't put it—to be charmed only by me."

"Ah, that's too superlative," she sighed derisively.

"To be said of any woman? Possibly! You're a woman and you ought to know," he reflected. "But she's the sort of woman one says rather more of than one ought."

"And rather more to than one ought."

"Well, yes, perhaps. One forgets, of course; but I fancy I must have said a good deal."

"She could listen to a good deal, no doubt," said Ethel Vernon slowly.

"She could listen absorbingly," he replied with ardour.

"And you said all you knew?"

"Heaven pity a poor woman! no! You forget my attainments. I said all that I was hopelessly ignorant of. That proved infinitely more attractive."

"I daresay it did," she agreed shortly. "Your ignorance of what you shouldn't say to a woman is past belief."

"I don't think it passed hers," he said pensively. "She hasn't your capacity for distrust."

"She'll acquire it," returned the other drily. "And what do you do in that sort of place? I heard you sailed with her."

"I sailed with her, I sat with her, I supped with her! The brother was obligingly occupied, and preoccupied, with the estate—which yields about half what it costs him—and so she had to look after me."

"Which wasn't difficult?"

"Simplicity itself," he smiled. "She had to look such a very little way; I was never out of her sight."

"Idyllic!"

"It was. We sailed from the hour the mists lifted till the moon rose to show us home. Or we sat together on little beaches with only the wide seas in sight."

"Where she made love to you?"

"Where she made love to me. On a strand of fairy shells, with a sapphire pool beside us and her little arm about my neck."

Ethel Vernon laughed. "You're about the only man I know who would have told her to remove it."

"I didn't tell her to remove it. I abandoned myself to the situation. You didn't ask, by the way, if she were pretty."

"No, I heard that you had stayed there for a fortnight."

Caragh chuckled. "A very sage deduction," he replied. "Well, she is pretty, though you mightn't think so. It's the sort of prettiness that tempts you in."

"That tempts you in?" she questioned irritably.

"Yes, tempts you in to the character. Like a lamp by the window of a cosy room. Makes you want to go in, and loll in a chair, and look at the pictures—there are pictures—and feel comfortably and gratefully at home. There's a kind of beauty, you know, to which one says, 'Yes, very charming; but, for heaven's sake, let's stay outside!'"

"But you didn't stay outside Miss Nevin's?" Ethel Vernon asked.

"Miss Nevern's," he corrected. "No, as I've told you, I went in, and walked round, and wondered how she had kept it so unspoiled. Most girls' minds are pasted over with appalling chromos of the emotions, as painted in fiction; and there's a stale taint of some one else's experience in everything they do and say; a precocious air of having been vicariously there before. It's quite stimulating to come across a woman who is fresh to what she feels."

"Like the beautiful Miss Nevern! And how did it end?"

"Oh, how does it end?" he said with a sigh. "We vowed the endless everythings, and kissed, and parted. And here I am in Budapest!"

The lady in the chair looked up at him for some seconds with a slow smile upon her lips. "I wonder when you're going to be too old," she murmured, "to talk nonsense?"

"Oh, it wasn't nonsense," he answered mournfully.

She began some question as to his journey, but he checked it with a lifted finger and a sudden "Hush!"

She could only hear the dull rush of the river and the waning rumble of the town. Then above these floated, blown soft and faint as a thistle-seed against their faces, a bugle note from the black Castle of Buda across the stream.

A wailing cadence, twice repeated, and then the long melancholy call, with all its intricate phrases delicately clear, now that their ears were adjusted to the thread of sound, ending as it had opened with the falling cadence which left a last low mournful note upon the air.

"What is it?" she enquired as the sound faded.

"Last Post," he answered. "Wait!"

The gurgle of the river rose again, and the feebler murmur of the streets rejoined it. Then the call came once more; came with buoyant clearness through the blue night air, straight across the water.

The noises of the city seemed to cease, as though all stood listening to that fluting sweetness, and, when its last plaintive challenge died away, the slender echoes of other bugles could be heard repeating it to the distant barracks beyond the hill.

Long after the last was silent Caragh still stared out over the river at the girdle of lights along its further shore and the scattered tapers which burned beyond it up the Castle slope into the sky.

"That seems to impress you very much," said Ethel Vernon presently.

"It does impress me," he replied. "It doesn't seem to belong there."

He did not say why. It was seldom worth while to submit to a woman any sentiment that was unestablished. Convention was the passport to her understanding. But what, he wondered, had soldiers in common with that cry of the spent day? How were their blatant showy lives related to the impotent patience of its despair? It was as if some noisy roisterer had breathed a Nunc Dimittis.

But he only explained, when she pressed for his reason, that the call did not sound to him sufficiently truculent for a soldier's good-night.

He whistled its English equivalent. "That's more like it," he exclaimed. "The man who sleeps on that will sleep too deep to dream of anything but love, and blood, and beer."

They talked on under the stars till Harry Vernon stumbled out on to the balcony from the darkness of the room, and began at once an energetic account of his evening at the Casino. He never consulted the interest of his hearers, but his voluble information generally made his interest theirs. He was to inspect, on the morrow, more than most men would have cared to look at in a week, and he was certain to see it all with the weighty sense of responsibility to his country which only an under secretary can acquire. He apologized to his wife for leaving her introduction to the city with one as incompetent as Caragh to do it justice.

"He probably knows it a great deal better than you ever will," she laughed.

"He probably does," replied her husband with a grin, "but the parts he knows best he won't be able to show you."

Caragh threw a cushion at the speaker's head as he turned to say good-night to his wife.

VI

He went downstairs, and out on to the quay, turning southward along the river towards the Fövámház.

For a foreigner he knew Pest well, but his knowledge only led him now by its loneliest avenue. He stood for a long while, his back to the empty market-place—which glowed by day with the red and orange of autumn ripeness—his elbows on the broad stone embankment, gazing out across the swirling river on which the starlight slid and shivered in darting streaks of gold.

He hated himself for what had taken place that evening, as he had often with equal reason hated himself before.

Somehow he seemed to lack the personal seriousness which saved men from treating their own affairs with the humorous tolerance which they extended to their neighbours! Life appeared to him the same comic spectacle from whatever point one saw it. Fate was often just as funny when it killed as when it crowned you, and however intimately they might annoy him, he never could keep back a laugh at its queer ways.

It was Fate's whim at present to make him look like a scoundrel by a deed that was probably as decent as any he would ever do, and the irony of his ill-luck so tickled him that, in laughing at it, he had become really abominable.

A sentimentalist with a sense of humour cut, as he could see, a very poor figure; it were better, so far as appearances went, to be a pompous fool.

Self-esteem is so widespread a virtue that the world, whatever it may say, is always impressed even by ridiculous dignity, and its one universally unconvincing spectacle is the man laughing at himself. Besides, when a man finds himself absurd, what is he likely to think imposing?

Yet, for all his humour, Caragh sighed. For the moment, as on many previous moments, he craved the solemn personal point of view to make life seem for once of some importance and give him a taste of undiluted tears.

His reflections were interrupted by something rubbing against his leg.

It proved to be a little white dog, and he addressed some whimsical advice to it about the time of night before looking out again upon the river. But as the animal made no sign of movement, but merely shivered against his ankle, he lifted it up and set it on the parapet before him.

From an inspection there he found it to be all but starved, with just strength enough to stand.

He was indifferent to dogs, and felt that the wisest course, as he explained to it, would be to drop the trembling creature into the water and out of a world that had used it so ill.

But he was very far from indifferent to the waif-like loneliness that gazed at him from its eyes, and, tucking it resignedly under his wrap, he turned back to the hotel.

He spent an hour there, feeding it with some biscuits that remained from his raft journey, soaked in whisky and water, and then, since the little thing refused to rest but on the bed, he made the best of its odorous presence beside him, and only cursed his own soft-heartedness when waked occasionally by its tongue.

On the morrow he began to show Ethel Vernon the city, and for two days she was too interested and fatigued to find fault with him. She had discovered the terrier, and enthusiastically adopted it, to Caragh's relief, being as devoted to dogs as he was apathetic.

But on the third evening, when they were sitting again together upon the balcony after a quiet afternoon, she spoke her disappointment.

The night was as splendidly blue as it had been when they sat there before; and she, dressed in black, with blue-black sequins woven over her bodice and scattered upon her skirt, looked to be robed in some dark cluster of starlight in her corner of the balcony.

They had been talking of matters in which neither took much interest; then after a long pause she said quietly, "Why are you so different?"

"I?" he exclaimed.

"Oh, please don't pretend," she sighed. "What is it?"

"I told you," he said doggedly, "the other night."

"The other night?" she repeated. "What, when we were here?"

"Yes," he said.

She reflected for a moment. "About that girl, the one in Ireland? Do you mean that?"

"I do," he said.

"Do you mean it was true?" she asked with increasing tenseness.

"Quite true," he said.

"But you were laughing," she protested incredulously. "I took it for a joke."

"I'm always laughing," he said grimly; "but I wish I hadn't been then. It was so serious that I couldn't be. But it's no good explaining that; you can't understand."

Her mind was set on something different—on something to her of more moment than a man's absurd reasons for being trivial. It was some time before she spoke.

"You asked her to marry you?" she pondered slowly, only half in question, as though scarcely able to realize what he had done.

"I did," he said; "how else should we be engaged?"

"Oh, dozens of ways," she answered: "she might have asked you."

"Well, she didn't," he said stoutly.

"I wonder if you know," she mused; "men don't. And did you want to marry her?"

"Would I have asked her otherwise?" he demanded.

"Oh, yes," she sighed; "very possibly. Men often propose because they can think of nothing else to say. And have you wanted to be married long?"

"What do you mean?" he said.

"Three months?" she queried.

The light little head was tilted sideways in old fascinating way. It was not so dark but he might have seen it had he not been staring at the stars. He might even have noticed, had he looked closer, how wide her eyes were, and how unsteady the small mouth.

"Why three months?" he said.

"Wasn't it three months ago we were at Bramley Park?" she went on reflectively. "Can you still remember what you told me there?"

"Was it different from what I'd told you everywhere?" he parried.

"No—o!" she murmured, with a long wavering breath; "not until to-night. You said you could never, while I lived, think of marrying another woman."

"Yes," he assented; "I remember. We were looking down at the moonlight on the lake."

"We were," she said. "And you had your hand on mine. You put it there; you put it there as you spoke. Were you thinking how wonderfully easy it was to fool a woman?"

"I've never fooled you, nor tried to fool you," he answered quietly. "I've cared for you too much for that. No, not in the common way; but because you've always been such an honest and good friend to me. Some women insist on being fooled; they make any sort of truth to them impossible. You made a lie."

"So it seems now," she said wistfully.

"No," he replied, "it seems now just the opposite. But I can't help that."

"You could have helped it ... once," she said.

"Oh, we can always help things once," he objected.

"Did you know her when we were at Bramley?"

"Yes, very slightly."

"Very slightly, only three months ago," she repeated incredulously.

"Yes," he said.

There was a pause. Ethel Vernon's fingers were playing nervously with a ring.

"When did you want to marry her?" she asked at length.

He hesitated in his turn.

"I can't tell you that," he said.

"Why?" she questioned. "Don't you know?"

"I know perfectly," he said.

"Well?" she queried. Then, as he made no response, "Haven't I the right to know?"

"I can't say," he answered. "I haven't the right to tell you."

"Why?"

"It isn't only mine to tell," he said.

"It's hers, you mean?" she exclaimed. "Everything's hers, I suppose, now; everything that you once could call your own! Did you ever share your life with me in that fashion?"

"You forget," he said gravely. "She shares herself."

Ethel Vernon leaned towards him fiercely. "Do you mean——" she began impetuously, and stopped.

He turned and looked steadily into her angry eyes. Her quick breath spread the starlight to a vague and smoky blueness among the gleaming sequins on her breast. "Yes," he said, "that is probably what I do mean. First or last, whatever you may call her, it's the woman's self that counts."

She remained for a moment with her eyes still passionately alight, and something visible even in the dusk upon her face which she would and would not say. Then her mouth hardened, and she flung herself back in her chair.

"I hate you," she cried.

"No," he said with a sigh; "you hate the fact. Every woman does whom it doesn't profit."

There was nothing said between them for some minutes, and Caragh could hear the silk ripple as her foot swung to and fro among the ruchings of her skirt. The sound brought back another silence, when she had sat beside him on an English summer evening in a dusk almost as deep; brought back the hour from that scented night when, with the spells of strangeness still upon her charm, he had listened to her ankles' silken whisper, and felt in the dark the unendurable sweetness of her presence rob his life of its desires.

He was carried so far by the memory that the change in her voice startled him when she spoke again.

"What did you tell her about me," she demanded.

"I didn't tell her anything," he said.

"She hasn't asked about your past?"

"Not yet."

"You think she won't?"

"Oh, no, I don't," he smiled.

"And when she does! Will you tell her the usual lie?"

"Did I tell it to you?"

"You didn't ask me to marry you," she thrust back. "One treats the woman differently that one's going to share."

"Yes," he admitted doubtfully, "it's very possible one does. Only I think the sharing works the other way. One tells her the truth in common honesty."

"Never!" she exclaimed. "You tell her the truth in transcendental lunacy, and wish you'd bitten your tongue out five minutes later when you see she thinks you a sweep."

He turned towards her with a smile. "I'm afraid my transcendental lunacies are about done," he said.

She laughed. "To judge by the last of them," she retorted.

"The last of them!" he exclaimed reprovingly. "You shouldn't speak of marriage by so wild a name."

"I don't," she said shortly; "only of yours. Will you swear to me that you love her?"

"Willingly," he answered, "if you're unwise enough to ask."

"To ask for an oath which would have no meaning?"

"None whatever," he replied. "What would you expect?"

"The truth!" she said. "Isn't it due to me?"

"Yes," he admitted, "and you've had it; though it hasn't been easy. Consider if a man is likely to relish the sort of confession that I've made to you?"

"You couldn't very well avoid it," she reminded him.

"Oh, yes, I could," he said. "I might have quarrelled with you—you're uncommonly easy to quarrel with—and then ... when you heard of my engagement you'd have put it down to pique."

"You thought of doing that?" she asked distrustfully.

"Yes, I thought of that and of a dozen other ways of—well, of taking you in," he admitted, "and of getting out of it myself."

"It doesn't sound very brave," she said softly.

"No, it sounds uncommon paltry, I've no doubt," he agreed. "I funked it, and I tried to think it would have been kinder as well as pleasanter to keep you in the dark. Would it?"

She shook her head.

"Well, I don't know," he reflected doubtfully; "I fancy you'd sooner have thought that you had done it than that I had, however little you might have liked it. And you'd have been a bit sorry for me, instead of thinking me a beast."

"I'm sorry for you as it is," she answered quietly.

"What do you mean?" he exclaimed.

"I don't believe you love her," she said unsteadily.

"Oh, well," he murmured with a shrug; "then I can't persuade you."

She shook her head again—the little tossing shake which reminded Caragh sharply of how she used to tease him, through the curls that sometimes fall across her eyes. He was looking at the stars before she spoke again.

"I think there's one thing you might tell me which wouldn't hurt her if I knew," she said persuadingly. "Was it because you'd come to care less for me that ... that you ... that you asked her?"

He rose from his seat, and leant against the iron trellis of the balcony, looking out across the river.

"Was it?" she pleaded.

"No!" he said to the night. He turned presently and took a step to enter the room. "Time I went," he said, checking his progress as he passed her chair.

She laid her fingers upon his sleeve. "Morrie!" she whispered.

He stooped and kissed her face, while her detaining hand slipped with a soft pressure into his.

Then she let it go, and sat, listening, as the sound of his footsteps died away beyond the room; sat gazing out at the moving sky, with a face from which the light had faded, till Henry Vernon's voice surprised her dreams.

VII

It was in the following June that Caragh found himself preparing for his final visit to Ballindra. Lettice Nevern and her brother had been in town for some six weeks during the winter, and his business affairs having straightened themselves, and enabled him to anticipate a sufficiently plausible income for two people, he had asked Arthur Nevern formally for his sister's hand.

Nevern understood the proposal and the man who made it so slightly, that, displeased by the prospective loss of an admirable housekeeper, he began to pile up, breathlessly, inflated obstacles to its fulfilment.

Caragh heard him out.

"It's a confounded nuisance, of course, for you," he said; "these sort of things always are for somebody. That's why I've waited to get my side of it square before bothering you, so that you'd know for certain from the outset when your sister would be leaving you. We're not going to decide where to settle till we can look at places together, so that won't make for delay, but she refuses to be hurried over her kit, as it's to provide six months' food for some pet school of hers in Ballindra, so I've given her till July. The only question is, would you sooner the wedding was over there or here?"

Arthur Nevern stared at the younger man's directness, but he discovered speedily that he might stare as he pleased.

The little that Lettice had was in her own right, and Caragh had asked no more with her from the man before him.

Nevern was thus left with nothing to refuse but his consent, and that, apparently, was of no consequence to those who asked it.

He gave it at last as ungraciously as he could, and agreed later that the ceremony should be in London, in order to share its expense with an aunt of his who had offered her house.

He twitted Caragh with his impatience, and Caragh smiled.

His smile touched a point of humour unlikely to tickle a future brother-in-law, but he suggested that a man's hurry to be married seldom appealed to his friends.

He might have added that the reasons for it in his own case did not appeal to himself, but they were too serious and disconcerting even for his sense of the ridiculous.

They were, put briefly, the possible attraction of another woman; and it was his despairing self-contempt that goaded him to dispose, so high-handedly, of any obstacles to his marriage with Lettice Nevern.

It was particularly characteristic of him, that while reflecting almost every hour on some fantastic chance that might avert their union, he applied his foot with an almost unmannerly intolerance to any of the reasonable hindrances in its way. That was of a piece, no doubt, with his marked aversion from any form of moral hedging, and his preferred fondness for an honest lie.

He had stayed at Budapest for three days after his confession, to keep Ethel Vernon company till her husband's engagements were at an end. He had asked her if she wished him to remain, and she had said indifferently that he must please himself. He did not please himself; but he did not go.

The terms on which they met and spoke were strained and curious.

Caragh in his perverse fashion found them stimulating. Ethel made not the faintest reference to what he had told her, but she treated him neither with the familiar plainness into which they had fallen, nor as a common and secure acquaintance.

There was about her bearing an extraordinary delicacy and distance such as a girl uses to deny herself to the man to whom, unconscious, she has, proudly and irretrievably, given her heart.

Having exhausted the interests of the town, they spent the time in long drives to the places she expressed a wish to see in the country; an occupation not pre-eminently adapted to an evasive relationship.

On the fourth morning she said to him, simply:

"I can't stand it any more. You must go."

"Have I been a brute?" he asked.

"No," she said; "you've been extremely nice. Perhaps that's why. I don't know: I've tried not to know. Perhaps I may feel differently when I meet you again. I can't say. I daresay not. But I can't go on as we are. You don't mind my asking, do you? I don't think you wanted to stay. Why should you? I can make up something to Henry about your going: there's always the telegraph to account for things. And don't write, please, unless I ask you to. I'm going to try to forget you—if I can. What's the use of doing anything else? I've been a fool enough as it is."

There was in Caragh's eye the remembrance of days when it seemed as if that desired oblivion would be his to seek, days when his devotion had appeared to be quite obliterated from her memory by the surprising splendour of some one else.

That was, of course, the last thing of which he could remind her, but it was, too, the last he could forget.

He had accepted the real misery of those days without murmuring; at least he might use their ancient poison as an anodyne now. Not to excuse, nor to exalt himself, but to dilute, as it were, now that he had to drink it, the cup of her indignation.

It made the sour of that seem, at least, not quite so much of his own mixing to remember that, twice at least in the last two years, he might have drifted from her on occasions when her attention was too engrossed by another to notice that he was gone.

He would have liked in the friendliest fashion to have led her memory to those days, to show her how dispensable he was; only, he reflected one never knew how a woman would take that sort of consolation: he was not very sure if he would value it himself.

And when it came to his good-byes, he felt anything but fitted for the consoler's office. He had come to Pest bitterly grieved to lose a friend; but he left it like a baffled lover.

The shy strangeness of her manner and the proud distance in her eyes had brought again about Ethel Vernon the glamour of days when his heart beat quicker at her approach.

With every hour of indifference the old provocation in her presence grew. He felt that to stay would be but to yield to it again, and he heard with a dismal relief her sentence of exile.

He set himself rigidly to pack his things, yet where to go he could not determine. That invisible bond which tied him to the future made all the difference to a man's plans. The East beckoned—he was half way to it—and the green harbours of the Asian coast.

But that meant money, as he knew of old, and it was lack of money that had deferred his vow. In all honesty he could not spend upon himself what he had half pledged to another. He turned disconsolately towards home.

He drifted about during the autumn from one shoot to another. It was his ordinary occupation for three months of the year, yet now it seemed unusual. It seemed outside a new continuity of existence which had begun for him.

But he devoted himself to settling his affairs, and was able in consequence, as has been narrated, to propose himself as an unwelcome relative when Arthur Nevern was in town.

Caragh had looked forward doubtfully to meeting Lettice again, under conditions which might suit her so much less well as a background than the open downs and the sea. But his forebodings were gloomy enough to be disappointed.

She had some art in dress, as he had noted from her evening frocks, and if in the daytime she seemed for town sometimes a trifle decorative, it was a decoration on which those who passed her bestowed an approving eye. She needed a certain amplitude to set her off. The big fur collar, and the expansive hat made the modelling of her face seem daintier than it was. With her hat off, her prettiness owed everything to the fair fine hair that curled almost to her eyes. Maurice had once brushed it back in a playful moment, but he never risked the disillusionment again. He needed every aid to his attachment that artifice could supply.

She seemed, on her part, to be aware that her beauty required management. It was not of a sort to be worn with a disdainful indifference as to how it might strike you.

It had to be looked after, or it didn't strike you at all. She kept a conscious eye upon her fringe, and she left occasionally, as Caragh had noticed, a harmless confederate with her complexion on the lapels of his coat.

He brushed off the powder with a mixed sense of regret and gratitude. He was sorry she needed it but, since the need was there, better she had the wit to know it and the ambition to look her best. Better far than to suppose with an arrogant vanity that to his infatuation nothing could come amiss.

Of what, indeed, came most amiss she probably had not a suspicion. The breezy life of Ballindra had admitted few mental interests, and, in the country, character, which it develops, often has the air of mind. In Lettice, whose character was charming, the resemblance had deceived Caragh. But in London, where character sinks and mind is on the surface, his estimate was corrected.

He endured dreary plays in which she delighted; he sat bravely at ballad concerts; he listened without a groan to her enthusiasms upon domestic art; he tried to read the books she praised.

The outlook was depressing. The same fear touched him that must have fallen upon Babel. Here, for life was a companion who on its finer interests would never understand a word he said. He might, perhaps, bring her painfully to a sense of her unsuspected ineptitude; might make her mechanically conscious of the commonplace; might shake her faith in ignorance as a standard of art. He might in fact taint the sincerity of her admirations. That was all.

In art—and art is but the tenderer appreciation of life—they would never use the same language, never understand each other's speech. The marvelling thrill of familiar strangeness, of joyous apprehension, which the subtlety of art can wake in the initiate, they would never share.

That was not much to miss, perhaps; but, when Caragh tried to think of something its absence would not affect, he stopped in dismay.

Yet apart from her appearance, in spite of her deficiencies, the girl's love wrought a change in him of which, with surprise, he found himself aware.

It became less of an effort to return her caresses, and her kisses no longer made him feel guilty of impersonating her lover.

They never woke in his veins even a momentary ardour, and now, his pulse beat under them no whit the faster, but he had begun to grow susceptible to the quickened throb of hers. The shy renouncement of her self-restraint, as she let the secrets of her being pass, between queer little moods of resistance, into the strangeness of his power, moved him to a sense of protective tenderness he had never felt before.

VIII

It was shortly after he had said a last good-bye to Lettice Nevern that Caragh's troubles began afresh.

He had the best intention to acquire the married habit, or a habit, at any rate, that should differ widely from the one he had.

With that object he secluded himself for a fortnight from the life to which he was accustomed, and denied his company, for reasons which they vigorously disbelieved, to his friends.

He could allow himself the theatre, having never cherished lime-lit illusions, nor hovered to dispel them about the stage door. He had always what he was pleased to call a frugal taste in beauty, and had never made a bid for any that was 'priced'!

But the theatres only served him for a week, and even so with some exaggeration of what he wished to see. At the end of a second, he decided that a wife was as essential as repentance to a change of life, and dropped back into his old ways.

And the devil, who, perhaps as a reprisal for the deficiencies of his own abode, takes a pleasure in knocking the bottom out of every sort of domicile, at once put his foot through the flooring of Maurice Caragh's reform.

At least he met Laura Marton at the dinner which closed his fortnight's sojourn in the wilderness.

He was suffering from those two weeks of his own society, but, probably, even without that preparation, he would have capitulated to her charm.

To speak of him, so consecutively, in the hands of three women gives too crowded an impression of his susceptiveness. No trait was, in fact, further from his character.

Three years were passed since he met Ethel Vernon, and he had not harboured in all of them so much as a vexed thought about a woman's face.

He was pleased so far from easily, that he might very readily have failed throughout his life to have been pleased at all. But when pleased, it was on the instant and absorbingly. Ten seconds he had suggested as an average requirement for falling in love, but it is questionable if any of his own declensions had taken half that time. Nor was proximity at all essential. He could not recall, he admitted modestly, having discovered that a woman was adorable at more than a hundred yards. But he had no wish to exalt his own experience into a standard: he could believe in anything up to half a mile.

In that, such was the delicacy of his distinctions, he was perfectly sincere; but it was that delicacy which made them so prohibitive to adorations even at half a mile.

Laura Marton might, perhaps, have tested such a distance successfully, she was so perfectly his conception of a type.

He conceived a good deal in types, and preferred the typical even to the length of its deficiencies.

Deficiency did indeed play a part in Laura Marten's attractions, since the broad mouth, the long eyes, and the drowsy luxuriance of her figure were without everything that could make them harmless.

She came under the superbs in Caragh's catalogue, and to the superb he was almost a stranger.

That, perhaps, speeded his intimacy.

"You can take it for granted that I think you magnificent," he said at their first meeting.

This was their last. It epitomized sufficiently what had happened in the interval. Some of it might be accounted for by his having told her that the next interval was for ever.

The occasion was a dance at a big house in Grosvenor Square. It was Caragh's last appearance as a bachelor in town, since he started on the morrow for a trip which the owners of a new Atlantic liner were taking in her round the Isles. He was to be dropped at Ballindra, where his marriage, for recent family reasons, was after all to take place.

He was seated on a lounge in a blind passage near the top of the house, and, though still early in the evening, he had been sitting there for some time.

He knew the house more intimately than most of those who were seeking for such seats, and this one was left to him and his partner entirely undisturbed. The music floated up the stairs with varying distinctness, as the dancers choked the entrances to the great gallery below.

He was leaning back, with his arms half folded and a hand upon his mouth, looking straight before him.

Laura Marton, sitting sideways with one white arm along the top of the lounge and the sweep of her amber-coloured skirts against his feet, bent forward insistently towards him; a braid of gold across her splendid shoulders, and a band of turquoise in her brown hair.

The long soft fawn gloves were crumpled in her lap, and her left arm, which hung straight and bare beside her, tapped a turquoise fan against her ankle as she waited for his reply.

"I know," he sighed. "You don't and you can't see it: what's the use of my saying it again? You're sure no woman would care for what I'm giving her, if she only knew. I daresay; but, you see, she's not going to know. She's going to luxuriate in an apparent adoration. That's easier than to be happy with one that's inapparent, however actual. And it's a lot likelier that the make-believe will last; because—well, because there's nothing in it not to."

He smiled whimsically at his own English, but the girl's face darkened with a frown.

"It makes no difference how you put it," she exclaimed hotly; "the thing's detestable! You'll only look at it from your point of view; and because it's costing you so much, you think it must be worth all that to the girl. But it's not! You're getting her life, and everything that's in her and of her, and you're getting it for a lie! You think it's a fine lie, I know, the sort of lie that life is all along. You've told me that! Oh, yes, you have; or something like it. But what are you that you should handle a woman as if you had made her, and lie to her like a god! Do you think you're big enough to make that seem fair?"

"Ah, you don't understand," he murmured still staring before him, afraid to stir the fire in her smouldering eyes. "I'm doing this because I'm so small."

Her incredulous gasp was almost a repudiation; but she said nothing and he went on:

"Because the love that's worth perfidies and desertion and all the other personal superlatives will never come my way. I thought it would: yes! once, long ago. But it hasn't, and it won't. If I was big enough!"—he caught his breath—"Ah, that's another matter. For that love excuses everything—'red ruin and the breaking up of laws'—because it's bigger, and better, and more enduring than the world itself. But it isn't mine."

He stopped, and faced for an instant the furious blaze of her eyes. Then he said more slowly:

"So the next best thing seemed, for a man like me, to make a good girl's dreams come true; her dreams of love, and honour, and a man's desire ... when one is the man, and can."

"You're not the man!" she cried. "And it's wicked and cruel to pretend to be."

"Look here!" he said persuasively. "Suppose that you were as poor a thing as I am; suppose that you, too, had come to look for no more from love than it means to me, and that some one came along who took you for an angel; a man young and strong and pure with the one great passion of a lifetime showing all over him; and that, in too weak or too kind a moment you had let him take you in his arms, and let him believe then as true the dreams that he had dreamt of you, and sealed with your kisses the vows which he had sworn. Well! when you'd come to realize that all his strength and sweetness hung on his belief in you, would you call it wicked and cruel to go on with the pretence?"

She made no answer for some moments. The grip of her white fingers relaxed upon the couch and the fan hung quiet against her ankle as she continued to absorb him with her devouring eyes.

"You've forgotten me," she whispered at length.

"No," he protested; "you can't say that, can you? I told you at once."

"Told me what?" she demanded.

"That I was not free," he said.

"Yes," she exclaimed, "the very first time you spoke to me. As if I were certain to lose my heart if I had not been warned. I hated you pretty hotly for it too, I can assure you. And you might have saved yourself the trouble. I'd been told it before."

"Before?"

"Yes, by Ethel Vernon. She said, when she heard I was to meet you, 'He's going to marry a girl that he doesn't care a sou for.' How did she know?"

"She didn't know," he said.

"How did she guess then? Had you been in love with her?"

"Yes."

"She with you?"

"You forget," he said gravely: "she's a married woman."

"I did forget," she smiled. "And was there no one you were in love with between her and me?"

"I'm not in love with you," he said.

She smiled again, drearily. "Does it do you any good to say that?" she asked.

"No," he answered; "I said it for you."

"For me?" she objected.

"Yes," he replied; "you said I'd forgotten you."

"Do you call that remembering?" she enquired ruefully.

"Don't you?" he murmured. "Would I have said it for myself?"

"Said what?" she asked.

"That I'm not in love with you?"

"I daresay," she said.

"Even if it had not been true?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "I daresay," she said.

"Do you?" he smiled. "It's a good deal to dare." He drew a long unsteady breath. "Well," he sighed, "suppose it wasn't?"

"Wasn't true?" she said.

"Wasn't true," he repeated slowly. "Suppose that I've—wilfully—lied to you. Suppose that the hour I saw your face brought my lost dreams back to me; suppose that in you I found the woman for want of whom all my days have in despair been wasted; the one woman who could have made life splendid, and love passionate and ceaseless and supreme. Or, no! not even that, not even that! Suppose only that I felt your fascination as any man might feel it; that I was just bewitched by your beauty; that every day without its glamour was the darkness of death, and the thought of other men possessing it an unendurable torment. Suppose which you please, whichever seems to you simplest, or strangest, or most deplorable—and tell me again you think it was for my own sake that I was silent!"

The musing tone in which he had begun was gone before he ended. He had turned to her, even as he leaned a little back and away against the end of the lounge; his shoulders were squared, and his brows drawn above the gray eyes which gazed almost defiantly into her face.

And as his mood hardened hers had melted.

Darkness had spread again across her eyes; spread as the night above a lighted river—its depths a-glimmer with strange reflections, and her lips had fallen softly apart from their disdainful smile into an unconscious baby sweetness, through which she breathed.

She was listening with an absorbed intentness, with all her senses crowding to her ears.

Even her splendid carriage was relaxed; her bosom drooped; dark hollows showed about her throat; her chin sank, till the white shoulder on which she leaned almost touched a tiny ear; the fan slipped from her other hand and hung by the loop about her wrist.

Her eyes met his as he ended; and, as it were, beneath the long silence of that look he could hear the brushing sound of the breath between her parted lips, like the far-off pulse of the sea.

But he missed so the other change which came to her; came, as it were, when the senses which had been away, so tensely listening, returned with their news. They brought back no erectness to her bearing, but deepened and coloured her drooping beauty till its languor became in itself a mien, a seduction that grew more perilous and overpowering with each quickening breath that filled her breast.

But of all that Caragh noticed nothing. He saw only those wavering lights in the liquid darkness of her eyes, a darkness that spread about him till he felt the draught and swirl of its unknown waters.

It was from that he was taken by the sudden fastening of the girl's hands about his face, and he woke with a flash of enlightenment to all that was in hers.

He tried to shake his head, but she only tightened her fingers about it and drew it towards her, smiling, with a strength that astonished him.

"Don't," he said.

But she pressed her wrists against his cheeks till his mouth was crushed between them, and drew him closer; closer to the strange smile upon her lips—cruel, passionate, triumphant, and yet adoringly fond—which seemed to come from beyond the borders of the world he knew.

Then, with a bird's swiftness, her lips were against his face, bruising it with the wildness of her kisses, as she held it in a clutch that pained him to the plundering madness of her mouth.

Unable to speak, he caught her wrists to draw them from his face, but at the touch of her skin his hands lost the power to help him, and hung idly like heavy bracelets upon her arms.

They had slipped to her elbows and fallen unclasped from them, when, as suddenly as she had seized it, she thrust his face from her to the full length of her arms and held it there, gazing into it with the fury of despoiled possession, which had the same savage strangeness as her smile.

Caragh's eyes were gravely distressed. "Don't, don't!" he pleaded.

Then she opened her hands and threw his face out of them away from her, with a little low crying laugh horrible to hear, and sat, leaning sideways and motionless, her head propped on her wrist, looking away from him across the back of the lounge.

Caragh merely straightened himself in the corner where she had flung him. He did not turn to look at her, and said nothing.

There was something in what had happened past explaining; its very lawlessness made it natural, put it outside of everything, in a place by itself where there were no measurements, where there was no proportion.

He was unconscious of any surprising experience, and did not give a thought to what might be passing in the girl's mind.

And she, sitting there with that wrecked air of passion, seemed as utterly indifferent how she appeared to him.

"You were right," he said at length, looking straight before him: "I've done it all for myself."

She gave him, without turning, a glance from her exhausted eyes, but took no further notice.

"I'm going back because I daren't fail her. I think too little of myself, God knows, to risk thinking less. Can you understand that? I was falling lower and lower, losing hope that I could ever be constant to anything that loved me. Then she came. It hadn't mattered with the others. I was only something to them that any one could be. But she was different—different because she had never loved before, and I meant everything to her that love can mean to a woman's life, everything that is sacred and tender and divine. And I saw in keeping her love pure and happy the one thing that could lift me out of the pit and let me look myself in the face again. It's the one chance that's been given me, and if I can't take it I'm done for. Yes, it's sheer selfishness, as you said; but I'm going back to her. Do you understand?"

She did not move nor look round at him. "You love me," she said dully.

"It makes no difference," he answered.

She gave a little mirthless laugh.

"But it will," she said; "it will. You'll remember me when she can't understand you, and my kisses when you're sick of hers, and my arms when she's asleep beside you. You won't think then that it makes no difference. You won't say then that she was the one chance for you. You'll remember then that a woman loved you whose love was all that you had dreamed. Maurice, Maurice, you're not the sort of man that makes a saint!"

He turned to her and put out his hand. "I'm going," he said. "Good-bye!"

She laid her left hand in it. Hers was quite cold, but she shivered as she touched him. "Will you come back to me ever?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"Never?"

"Never, never!"

"If you want me, you must say," she went on impassively. "It won't matter what I'm doing—I mean if I'm married, or anything. If you want me, I'll come to you. But you must say. Love ... ah! you don't know what it means!"

He left her with a pressure of the hand, and she caught a glimpse of him as he groped his way towards the stairs. But she did not stir, nor try to stop him.

IX

Caragh sat with his back to the saloon skylight, watching the cloud-shadows racing over the soft green Irish coast.

Between him and it was a heaving space of dark blue water, crested here and there with gleaming white.

The gale of the night was blowing itself out, but the wind still sang against the spars that swung to and fro through a wider arc of the sky than most of the guests on board found compatible with an appearance at breakfast.

Woolly flocks of white cloud came up from the Atlantic, raced through the clear blue overhead, and huddled down together behind the land.

It was a day boisterous with the joy of life, but Caragh's face showed no appreciation of its quality. His chair slid forward and back with the rolling deck, but his eyes were fixed gloomily upon the green hills, and he paid no heed to his own movement.

His sombre absorption gave him the appearance of being affected by the floundering seas; but he never suffered from sea-sickness and was grateful to the gale for having cleared the deck of the ship's jovial company.

He wished to be by himself, and yet it was himself that he was most anxious to evade; it was from self-sickness that he was suffering.

He had spoken the truth in telling Laura Marton that the faith in Lettice Nevern's eyes was his one hope of deliverance. He believed, if he could respond to that, even with the honest dishonesty which alone was possible—if he could, as he told her, "make a good girl's dreams come true"—that he might in time build up for himself an artificial constancy, and so regain his self-esteem.

That hope seemed not too high, face to face with the woman who was doing her best to shatter it. It sustained him while he was fighting her fascination—successfully, as he told himself; while he was dragging his weakness in a wounded sort of triumph, out of her reach; while he was hurrying his things on board the day after.

But there, unluckily, his victory ended. Seated apathetically in a deck-chair on the Candia, watching the long coast slip by from Thanet to the Lizard, the leaden turmoil of the Channel, and then the clouded purples of the Kerry Hills, he learnt how superficial was his advantage, how deeply he was in bondage.

He had, indeed, got out from England, but he had brought so little of himself away that it seemed an impertinence to offer it to any woman in marriage. His heart—or at least what in such affairs is called the heart—and all those cravings of the body which go with the heart were, and would remain, in Laura Marten's keeping.

She was right in every boast of her dominion over him. She was the woman for whom he had not waited, of whom long ago he had despaired. The woman who could have satisfied him body and soul, absorbing his desires, inspiring his dreams.

No partiality in the past had persuaded him to imagine that of any woman he had admired. They were just what they were—dainty, lovely, brilliant, bewitching; but nothing more to him than to any one who had a taste for them.

But here at last was the woman made for him, mad for him: warm with that fugitive spirit of sense which was in her only and for him alone.

He knew that, though he knew not how he knew it, as certainly, as responsively as a lock knows the wards of its key.

It was as a key that she had entered him; and within him, at her moving, the levers of a secret life had stirred—a strange new complexity of being which no mortal influence had disturbed before.

She had revealed to him all that life had not yielded him, all that now it could never yield, a correlation undreamed of between man and woman.

And she had come curiously too late. That was his bitterness. He would have sacrificed for her every other allegiance of the past, save this one which brought him no pleasure. From Lettice Nevern he could only come to her as a man debased for ever in his own esteem. Nothing could excuse such a betrayal, nothing could redeem him after it was done.

Happiness with the woman he must marry was out of the question; but happiness without her was now for him equally uncompassable. He had a choice only between two sorts of despair. Under such conditions it seemed improbable that he would prove a very cheerful companion, but such predictions were with Caragh especially difficult. His humour was always available for his own misfortunes, and in this case his fortune was too deplorable not to be concealed.

Since it entirely absorbed his unconscious thoughts his attention always seemed preoccupied; an abstraction which lent however, an agreeable effect of detachment from ordinary worries.

He was, perhaps for that reason, the serenest member of the ship's company, and the one most obligingly at the service of other men's affairs.

But on this windy morning he was allowed to reflect on his own adversities, till a shout from forward called his eyes towards the shore.

The Candia had just cleared a long headland and opened the narrow bay beyond, where, canted slightly to starboard, lay a big three-master, the rags of her royals and a staysail slapping the wind, the long blue rollers breaking against her in spouts of foam.

She was evidently on the rocks, and yet an impracticable distance from the forbidding shore, which swept in a purple skirting of cliff about her. Dark figures could be seen moving on the bridge and in the rigging, and the flutter of a woman's skirts could be made out against the shrouds.

The Candia stood in towards the shore, and her decks were soon crowded with excited passengers, waiting anxiously the lowering of a boat and speculating on the way in which a rescue would be attempted.

A line of colour ran up to the barque's peak, and was answered presently by a signal from the steamer; then the engines slowed and stopped.

The Candia rolled ponderously in the long swell while another signal was exchanged the splash of the lead becoming suddenly audible in the silence.

The vessels were now not more than five hundred yards apart, and every detail could be seen upon the wreck.

Save for the few figures on the bridge and poop, all those on board her had taken to the rigging, as the sloping decks were swept by the heavier waves.

Several women could be seen on her, and the glass showed them to be lashed to the shrouds, and apparently exhausted.

Each fresh evidence of urgency increased the impatience on board the Candia. Yet no scheme of assistance seemed in progress. The engines were reversed, the Candia backed in a trifle closer, the roar of the breakers began to make a continuous moil in the air, but the boats hung undisturbed on their davits.

The captain was on the bridge and could not be questioned, but presently Sir Anthony Palmer, who as chairman of the Candia's company was superintending the cruise, was seen coming aft with a grave face.

He said, in answer to a volley of questions, that no help could be given till the sea went down and the tide had risen. A ledge of rocks lay between the two ships, already defined occasionally by a thrash of foam over which no boat could pass.

The stranger must have been carried across it at high water some hours earlier, had struck on a second ledge between that and the shore, and was now equally cut off from succour from the sea or from the land.

Rockets were at once suggested, but Sir Anthony explained that the distance was too great for a rocket line to cover, and that the tides precluded the floating in of a buoy. Nothing could be done but wait and pray that the vessel might not break up during the next twelve hours.

Some one asked if she were likely to, and Sir Anthony admitted that she had signalled her fears of such an event.

"Couldn't some one swim to her?" said a voice from the taffrail.

Sir Anthony shook his head; to cross the ledge with the break of water on it at present would be to court almost certain death.

There was a pause; all eyes were turned towards the reef, where the vessel lay in the gay morning, like some masquerade of death, between the lovely colours of the sea and shore.

Caragh leant back in his chair with a yawn, and looked up at the sky.

"I'll take a line to her," he said placidly.

The backs of the heads between him and the ship's side became suddenly a ring of faces, and the first stupidity of surprise was expressed by the question, "Can you swim?"

Caragh looked at them with no expression of interest, and Sir Anthony shook his head.

"You couldn't do it, my dear fellow," he protested; "you couldn't do it!"

"Perhaps not," said Maurice; "but I can have a try." Sir Anthony's hands and head shook in voluble negation.

"The captain wouldn't permit it for a moment," he asserted.

"Well," said Caragh, "of course the captain can refuse me the use of a line, but he can't, without being very unpleasant, prevent my going overboard."

There was an instant's pause, and then the group about the chair burst into simultaneous suggestion and advice.

Caragh was slapped on the shoulder; his previous performances in the water were demanded; encouragement and remonstrance were alternately tendered, and everything obvious on the situation was said.

"I'm not a professional performer," he explained at last, "but I can keep afloat as long as most men, and if I'm ready to take the risks of a swim, I don't think it should be any one's business to stop me."

This met a varied response, and with a general acclamation for the captain the speakers were moving forward when that officer appeared, looking for Sir Anthony, who at once put the case to him.

The captain, with a glance at Caragh still seated in his chair, dismissed the matter with a shrug of his shoulders. But he had miscalculated the passiveness of the man before him.

Caragh got quietly upon his feet, looked across the water at the wreck, and then turned to the captain.

"If you can't spare me a line to take on board her, I'll have to bring you back one of hers," he said.

"I forbid you to leave the ship," replied the other briefly.

"Of course you can do that," said Caragh, looking again across the sea, "but it won't make a pretty story if those poor devils are drowned under our eyes."

At that moment a sailor brought the signalling slate aft to the captain, who looked glum and handed it to Sir Anthony.

"Tide's leaving her," he explained.

"Her back is breaking, is that it?" asked Sir Anthony.

The captain nodded.

"She won't hold together long after that?"

"Probably not," said the captain.

Caragh's offer found none but backers when the gravity of the signal was made known.

The captain still protested its insanity, but he was persuaded in the end to withdraw his prohibition and do what was possible to start the venture with the best chances of success.

The ship was to be taken a little nearer the southern shore to give the swimmer what help could be had from the tide, and the lightest line on board was prepared while Caragh went below to strip, accompanied by a couple of admirers, who insisted on the necessity of his being oiled before entering the water.

As he never expected to come out of it alive he had no wish for oil, but did desire urgently to be left alone for the next few moments.

He had made his offer from no surge of sympathy, no flush of valour. He was not braver probably than most of those on board, nor cared twopence more than they for the fate of the derelicts. His proposal was but the climax of his morning thoughts. He could endure himself no longer. The wretchedness of his passion would bear no further the thought of the girl he was on his way to meet. Every instant in the day-time, and night after night in his dreams, that splendid presence possessed him to which he had for ever said good-bye. And in the fever of that possession he could not think of a wife. Yet of what else could he think, as every hour brought her nearer, and made sharper for him the shame of her exultant face, and the reproach in her confiding arms. Never for an instant had his tenderness faltered. She was dearer to him than a sister; dearer by all she had given him, by all she was prepared to give; dearer above all by what she believed him to have given her.

And it was his tenderness that made unendurable the treachery of his faithfulness, the loyalty of the lie which was to make them one.

It was at the worst of such a reflection that death suddenly appeared to him as the escape, the release for them both; for the pledge which he had given and for her trust in his word.

Death, a high and honourable end, making a finish to his unprofitable life, leaving her with faith undimmed!

At that cold moment of his abasement there seemed nothing better. Given an hour to think it over and he would probably have recoiled from the sacrifice. There was even some measure of recoil in his mind as he went down the reeling ladder to his cabin, though there was no change in his determination. Death had ceased to look attractive; it was simply something for which, like a fool, he had let himself in. Yet under that was a dull indifference to what became of him.

He submitted to his oiling; then just as he was about to leave his cabin a remembrance came to him. He fumbled in his berth for the sovereign-case on his watch chain, opened it, slipped out a couple of gold pieces, took what looked like a wafer from beneath them, and put it into his mouth. The two men with him imagined the small gray disc to be some kind of sustaining lozenge. It was a tiny portrait of Laura Marton.

As he went shivering on deck Caragh made a wry mouth as his teeth met on the picture, and he imagined the suggestions its discovery would have offered to the woman he was to wed.

He had a hazy recollection afterwards of the close and eager crowd which surrounded him as he fitted the clammy belt of the lifeline about his body and climbed over the taffrail for a dive. It was a crowd warm with enthusiasm and admiration; with little to say, but with that in what it said which might have brought a blush to his whole body. But he heard nothing.

Then as the vessel lurched to starboard he let his body fall forward and shot down into the sea.

Before his head rose above the surface the cold water had changed his indifference to life into a disgust at his own temerity.

The ship heeled over as if about to impale him with her yards. Then he was lifted on the roller, and saw the wreck before him, looking much further off than it had from the deck. He laid his course on a cliff to the south which the captain had given him to steer by, and turned over on his side. His left arm swung high and white out of the blue water, regular and unhurried as though he were bathing, and his head dipped under and was driven clear of the surface with every stroke. With his face thrown back he could see the dark skirting of spectators along the ship's side swinging into and out of the sky.

They were admiring in speech and in silence his courage and cool indifference to the occasion, and the humour of their admiration moved him as he thought of it almost to a laugh.

That he, with his despairs, his self-contempt, his growing disgust at his foolhardiness, should appear to them as a heroic figure appealed to his keen sense of parody. What pretty reading in unconscious irony would the obituary paragraphs of his valour make for the gods of fate.

Yet valour of a sort he had, for it never once occurred to him to feign an inability to go further, though the line he carried was beginning to retard him at every stroke.

The ship he had left was now lost to him in each trough of the waves; he could hear the break of the rollers over the reef, and saw that the tide had already drifted him to windward of the wreck. The roar in front increased as he proceeded, and at last he could see, as he rose, the waves thirty yards beyond him suddenly flatten, flinging up a veil of spray into the air. For a moment he hung irresolute; there, if ever a man might see it, was death visible before him. Then, with a curious sense of obliteration, his mind cleared. It seemed empty of thought or fear as the open sky above him; not a shred even of anticipation floated anywhere within it. He trod water as he gathered a dozen loops of the lifeline in his hand, lest he should be hung up and dragged under by it when flung over the ledge. Then he went forward. A moment later, when the wave that had lifted him suddenly sank and smashed before him into a terrible welter of foam above the reef, his heart sank; but decision was past him. He knew that he was rising on the wave that followed, heard a strange crisp noise above him, and felt the crest dart forward like the head of a snake.

The next instant he was rolled up in the foam and flung onward like a whirling wheel. He lost his senses for a second from sheer giddiness, and found himself fighting for breath and the surface in almost quiet water, with the black sides of the wreck not fifty yards ahead.

The line was coiled about his body, but his limbs were free, and he seemed quite unhurt, and strangely unsurprised to be so, though but a moment back he had been prepared for destruction.

He was soon on the lee side of the wreck, and after some little difficulty was hauled on board, being too weak to lift himself from the water.

He fell when set down upon the deck, and only then discovered that two of the bones in his left foot were broken, and that blood was draining from a gash nine inches long in his thigh. He also became aware that, unlike the Candia, the wreck carried a mixed cargo of humanity, and was amused even in his unhappy plight to notice that its immense relief and gratitude quite overruled any considerations of sex.

There was no surgeon on board, the saloons were awash; but the women tore up their petticoats to bind his wound, and, rolled in blankets from the deck-house, he was made fast to the driest part of the poop.

There, drenched with spray and in a good deal of pain, he lay till evening, declining to use the means of safety he had provided till all but the captain and second mate had left the ship. The rigging up of a traveller had proved a difficult matter with the wreck heeling over as the tide left her, and the wind rising again after the ebb made all other means of communication impossible.

The captain was only got on board the Candia as darkness was falling, and Caragh had some salve for his hurts in the knowledge that the wreck slid off the reef and sank at high water before the next dawn.

He drew near Ballindra with sentiments a good deal modified by his adventure.

Life had proved itself to be worth more to him than he had supposed, and sheer weakness from loss of blood as he lay bandaged on the sunny deck made the quiet certainty of a woman's love seem good in itself.

Sir Anthony had telegraphed a very picturesque account of the rescue, and owing to the Candia having to put back to land her new passengers Lettice had read the story before Caragh arrived.

There is, perhaps, no happier moment possible to a woman than that in which she hears the world applauding the man she loves and is about to marry.

To Lettice, so new to love and to a near interest in any of the world's noises, the moment was almost overwhelming. It was a pain of happiness, a tense fear that such glad fortune could not endure. Caragh had sent her a wire, more kind than true, to say that he was mending splendidly, but she tortured herself with every sort of deplorable anticipation, till she came to expect little from the Candia's arrival but her lover's body.

But she woke one morning to see the big liner, gay with flags, lying before her windows at the mouth of the river.

She dressed at a pace that left her maid staring, and took the steepest of short cuts to the slip. There, at that hour of the morning, not a soul was to be seen, so she hauled in the lightest of the moored boats and sculled herself down the river against the tide.

On the way the maiden modesty, which had so far been as breathless as every other part of her, found a word to say.

For a moment the sculls stopped, and then dipped slowly to hold her against the tide.

Then the boat went ahead again, but more deliberately. While she was dressing Lettice had forgotten every one in the world but herself and Maurice. Now, with the big ship before her, she remembered the others.

As she ran down to the slip she had thought of nothing but to get to him as soon as possible. Now there seemed a dozen things besides, all very important for a young lady.

But her doubts and fears were set at rest by a shout from the ship, and she looked over her shoulder to see Caragh standing by the flag pole waving his hat.

He was at the head of the gangway as she came up it, on a pair of improvised crutches, looking very white, but with nothing left her to wish for in the welcome of his eyes.

Sir Anthony, who was at his elbow, as radiant as herself, protested fussily at his imprudence, and walked them both over to the chart-house, which had been arranged for Caragh's use, where he left them to order breakfast.

Lettice, fastened to her seat by the windows round her, and dumb with happiness, could only gaze into Caragh's face. He looked back at her with a smile, which broke at last in laughter.

"You've heard all about it?" he asked.

"Oh, I should think I had!" she breathed.

"Comic, wasn't it?"

"Comic!" she repudiated indignantly; "how can you?"

"I can't," he replied ruefully; "it's comic only for me, and no one else will ever see it. Ah, but if you knew!"

"I do know," she exclaimed imposingly, "and every one else knows that you were a hero."

"On Monday?" he queried.

"Yes," she said proudly, "on Monday."

"Heroes were cheap on Monday," he explained with a whimsical sigh, "but I've been a hero when heroes were very, very dear."

She looked at him with the wistful misgiving which was always stirred by his half-serious banter. "I know a hero," she said, "who is very, very dear to-day."

He met the love in her eyes with such a tender appreciation that, disregarding the windows, she had half risen to kiss him, when the head steward entering, wrinkled with smiles and suffusing the joyousness of the occasion, set a breakfast tray between them.

He greeted Lettice with the custom of an old retainer, and commented on Caragh's health as though personally responsible for its condition.

"We're all that proud of him, miss, I can tell you," he said as he withdrew with the covers.

But his flattery was spoilt for Lettice by the appearance of a meal which declared the newness of the morning with such emphasis.

"Was it awful, coming at such an hour?" she begged of Caragh.

"Shocking," he said unmoved; "five minutes earlier and you'd have found me in my bath."

"Oh!" she groaned; "I wish I'd waited for you on shore."

"In that case," he said, "I should probably have never landed."

"Never landed!"

"No," he went on; "I should have taken your absence for a sign that you couldn't goad yourself to meet me; that you were cowering at home, dreading my arrival, and with your heart lost to a much lovelier young man."

"Oh, Maurice!"

"Yes," he continued; "I have never been able to believe that any woman's flighty little soul could be worthy of my own virgin and unchangeable affection."

"Maurice," she pleaded, "don't say things like that to-day; I want you to be quite serious and quite yourself."

"Heaven forbid!" he protested as he took her hand.

The chief engineer had devised a sling to lower Caragh into the boat; the purser had illuminated an inscription to him, signed by every one on board; there seemed to be innumerable hands to shake and good wishes to respond to before the boat was clear of the ship's side.

And then he had to wave his hat again and again to the cheers and shouts of farewell, Lettice sitting beside him burning like a rose.

But her hour came when she had him laid at last upon a sofa by his favourite window, and was kneeling on the floor beside him. Her mouth had been thirsting all day to kiss him, and when he leaned his head back and smiled at her she set her lips on his as though to drink from them.

"Oh, my darling," she murmured, lifting her face to look once more into his eyes, "you can't think what these last few days have been. It didn't seem possible that you could live and come back to me after doing all those splendid things. It was too much happiness for any one. And I was horrid and faithless, and felt sure you'd die. I ought to have known that God would take care of us, because you'd been so brave and loved me so."

Despite himself there was a tinge of pain and shame that showed on Caragh's face, and Lettice lifted her arm that had rested, ever so lightly, across his body.

"Did I hurt you, dear?" she questioned anxiously.

"Oh, it's only just at first," was his ambiguous answer. But he drew her face towards him and kissed it again.

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