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Title: The Great Amulet


Author: Maud Diver



Release Date: December 31, 2006  [eBook #20238]

Language: English

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THE GREAT AMULET

by

MAUD DIVER







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

--R. L. S.


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

--Omar El Khuttub.




THE GREAT AMULET

by

MAUD DIVER

Author of "Captain Desmond, V.C."

Shilling Edition




William Blackwood and Sons
Edinburgh and London
MCMXV
All rights reserved




_THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO_

_TRIX FLEMING_


  _IN MEMORY OF DALHOUSIE DAYS._


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

  --Rossetti.




CONTENTS.


PROLOGUE


BOOK I.

AFTER FIVE YEARS


BOOK II.

JUST IMPEDIMENT


BOOK III.

THE TENTS OF ISHMAEL


BOOK IV.

THE VALLEY OF DECISION




THE GREAT AMULET.


PROLOGUE.

I.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"_Voila, cherie_, . . . enough of my endless adieux, or _ce bon_ Lenox
may be tempted to break the sixth commandment on my account, in
addition to the eighth."

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

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

Maurice laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No."

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

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

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

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

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

Quita threw up her head and laughed outright.

"Really, Eldred, you are delightful!"

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

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

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

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

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

"Rather!"

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

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

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

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

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

He laughed abruptly, and let her go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And don't the tribes respond?"

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

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

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

Lenox shrugged his shoulders, and laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




II.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why?  Who is it from?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She motioned him from her with an imperious gesture.

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

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

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

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

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

His tone spurred her to instant decision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footsteps in the bedroom brought Lenox again to his feet.

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

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

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

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

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

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




BOOK I.--AFTER FIVE YEARS.


CHAPTER I.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Decidedly."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lenox nodded without looking up.

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

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

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

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

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

Lenox came nearer, and took him by the shoulder.

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

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

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

"I am glad of that."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER II.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He relinquished her bridle at that.

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

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

"And you are not disappointed?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again the blood flew to her cheeks.

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

"And you flung away--my ring also?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He glanced at her keenly for a second.

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

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

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




CHAPTER III.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With an impatient sigh she turned to enter the house.

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

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

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

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

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

She laughed in spite of herself.

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

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

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

"_Mon Dieu_!  But what happened?  Tell me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"_Cela va sans dire_.  She wants it as a present for her father."

"Why not hang it first, at Home?"

"Afterwards, perhaps.  If she permits."

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

"Not altogether, _mon ami_--unless----"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His reward was a butterfly kiss between the eyebrows.

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

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

She stamped her foot in helpless irritation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER IV.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quita glanced at him quizzically.

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

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

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

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

The suggestion brought him to his feet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garth's smile lacked its habitual touch of cynicism.

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

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

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

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

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

She laughed, and lifted her shoulders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her low laughter maddened him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you know him well?"

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

"_What_ do you happen to know?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Good Lord!  Then--it was _you_?"

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

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




CHAPTER V.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She smiled and pressed him closer.

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

"You called him after Wyndham?"

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

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

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

But Lenox was long in beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I think so."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moved beyond his wont, Lenox leaned impulsively towards her.

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

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

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

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

He leaned back in his chair, and sighed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VI.

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


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

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

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

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

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

"Are you peculiarly lenient towards those three failings?"

"I am quite culpably lenient towards the whole tribe of human failings.
They are the salt of life.  I have never really understood that
incessant harping on the mystery of pain and sin.  The question, Why
should they be allowed to exist? seems to me simply fatuous.  No world
worth living in could have been created without them.  They are the
backbo