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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 59798 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE PLAGUE OF
+  THE HEART
+
+  BY
+
+  FRANCIS PREVOST
+
+  AUTHOR OF "FALSE DAWN" "BUST OF GOLD" "ON THE VERGE"
+  "ENTANGLEMENTS" ETC ETC
+
+
+
+  LONDON
+  WARD, LOCK & CO LIMITED
+  NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE
+  1902
+
+
+
+
+TO APRIL
+
+
+
+
+  Contents
+
+  THE SIEGE OF SAR
+  HER REPUTATION
+  THE MEASURE OF A MAN
+
+
+
+
+The Siege of Sar
+
+
+
+I
+
+"Have you heard, Captain Terrington?" cried the girl gaily.  "There's
+to be a Durbar after all!  So you were wrong.  It's to be in the Palace
+too, that you were so set against, and Lewis and Mr. Langford are going
+with Sir Colvin, and just the littlest guard of honour for the look of
+the thing.  Sir Colvin says the great thing with these sort of people
+is to show you're not afraid, and I'm _perfectly certain_ he's right."
+
+She sat upon the table, all in white; her hat slung upon her arm, her
+feet swinging to and fro amid the muslin fulness of her skirt, pointing
+her remarks with the tips of their gilded slippers.
+
+The man who had just entered the bungalow in khaki riding kit stood a
+straight six feet.  His face, strong and silent, was as brown as his
+jacket, and his spare figure had an air of tempered energy.  The only
+break in its entire brownness was the faded strip of ribands on his
+left breast.  At the sight of Mrs. Chantry he had checked the stride
+with which he entered, lifted his helmet, and pushed back from his
+forehead its damp brown lock of hair.
+
+As he stood staring at her with a frown, she set her wrists on the edge
+of the table, and rocked her body gently in time with her feet.
+
+"Well!" she exclaimed with a laugh as he stopped before her; "what did
+I tell you?  I said if you'd only leave Sar for a week I'd get the
+Durbar, and I've got it in three days!"
+
+She ceased her swinging, and looked up at him with an excited triumph
+in her eyes.  "Well?" she repeated provocatively, leaning back and
+putting the tip of a tiny tongue between her lips.
+
+He drew a wicker chair from the wall and threw himself into it with a
+sigh.
+
+"I only hope it isn't true," he said.
+
+She leaned forward over the table, gripping its edge, her face thrust
+out, like a figure on a ship's prow.
+
+"Honest Injun!" she cried, sparkling.  "Every word.  Durbar to-morrow.
+Khan's guard and tom-toms round at eleven, and off we march at noon.
+Oh! don't you wish you were going?"
+
+"Not at all," he said drily.  "I've never wished to die like a trapped
+mouse."
+
+She drew herself up resentfully.
+
+"How dare you say that," she cried; "when you know Lewis will be there!"
+
+"All right," he said, too tired to argue; "I'll try to see its good
+points.  How did this happen?"
+
+She was a flouting pouting bird again at once.
+
+"I did it," she declared.
+
+"Oh, did you," he replied without conviction.  "When?"
+
+"The moment you started foraging.  You're the only man in Sar who
+doesn't care a da---- a fig for what I think, so I had to wait till you
+were gone.  The others!"
+
+She gave a shrug to her pretty shoulders.
+
+"Well?" enquired Terrington.
+
+"Well, a woman's only got to let a man see she thinks he's afraid of
+anything to put him at it.  I let 'em all see," she said, smiling.
+
+He looked at her hard.
+
+"You think I couldn't?" she challenged.
+
+"I've never thought of anything you couldn't," he said simply.
+
+She looked at him, laughing softly.  Then, raising herself on her
+wrists, poised her dainty figure above the table, letting it swing
+between her arms, while she met with the fluttering twist of a smile
+the intent displeasure in his eyes.
+
+"What did you do it for?" he asked.
+
+She pushed herself back along the polished table till her knees and
+knuckles were side by side.
+
+"What does a woman ever do anything for?" she retorted, leaning over
+her perch with her elbows upon her knees.  "To show she can," she
+added, as he offered no solution.  "I was going to let you see you
+weren't the king of Sar."
+
+"Good God," he groaned in weary bewilderment.  "Where's Sir Colvin?"
+
+She shook her head slowly, smiling, from side to side.
+
+"Don' know, don' know, don' know!" she babbled.  "What did you get?"
+
+He took no notice of the question.
+
+"And your husband?" he said.
+
+"Lewis is with Sir Colvin.  May be anywhere.  Probably messing up my
+room.  They're preparing for the Durbar," she drawled with soft malice.
+
+His preoccupation paid no heed to it; and she went on:
+
+"It's wonderful the hours we do things at here.  Just decent
+breakfast-time and we've had half a day.  When did your Majesty
+breakfast?" she asked.
+
+"Some time yesterday," he said indifferently.  "Has Gale written?"
+
+But she was on her feet at once.
+
+"Oh, I say!" she cried.  "How horrid of you not to tell me!"
+
+The tatties on the anteroom entrance had closed behind her, like reeds
+behind a snowy pheasant, ere she finished speaking, and Terrington
+could hear the "Kitmatgar, O Kitmatgar!" of her lifted childish voice
+ring along the empty mess-room.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+As Rose Chantry left the room the light went out of Terrington's face,
+and an irresistible lassitude crept like a gray smoke across it.  He
+had been for three days in the saddle, with but a couple of his own
+guides, in a country cut by torrents from precipitous stone, among a
+silent and lurking people who were only waiting the word to murder him,
+and for the last day and night he had been living on food snatched from
+a holster as he rode.
+
+There was no one in Sar to whom he could delegate the duty; no one
+acquainted as he with the country and the people; no one who knew so
+intimately their private avarices and animosities; no one who could
+utilize their tribal treacheries and pretensions, to extract from them
+the grain they had a mind to keep.  They had known him five years
+before, while Sar was as yet unembroiled of its neighbours, and still
+admitted British influence and rupees, when his shooting feats had won
+him the nickname by which everywhere he was known, and the friendship
+of the men who were waiting now, without breach of friendliness, to put
+an end to him.
+
+It was on account of this intimate acquaintance that he had been
+selected to command the escort which accompanied Sir Colvin Aire, whose
+mission was to settle finally the standing of a resident, and of road
+repair and protection between Sar and the frontier.
+
+Such simple questions hung however like dewdrops on the web of a wide
+and hostile political influence.  Their disappearance would only be of
+importance as a signal that the meshes had been cut.
+
+Lewis Chantry had watched the network spreading during the six months
+he had served as political officer at Sar.
+
+He had smiled at it with a soldier's easy optimism, until he tripped
+one day upon a strand that was being woven between him and home.
+
+The Indian Government, palsied by a political change of control, and a
+demand for immediate cheapness however costly, answered his urgent
+appeals with vague precepts of compromise and Sir Colvin Aire.
+
+Sir Colvin was not cheap, but, from possessing no previous acquaintance
+with the question, and being the most easily available and palpably the
+wrong person, he had, at any rate, an air of cheapness.
+
+He was a big genial man, with no sense of his own importance, and a
+fixed belief in bluffness.  He had shewn Terrington his instructions,
+some six weeks earlier, on the night his escort joined him, and the two
+were sitting smoking after dinner outside the tent--the stillness of
+the evening only broken by the cry of a jackal or the scream of an
+owl--looking up at the black mountain wall that blotted out the
+northern stars, over which they were to climb on the morrow to an
+unknown fate.
+
+"You see, they say I'm to make the fullest use of your knowledge of the
+country," concluded Sir Colvin, as Terrington replaced the lantern by
+which he had been reading, and lay back in his chair.
+
+"I see," he replied quietly; "but they were careful to make no use of
+it themselves."
+
+"You're not in love with the trip?" asked the other.
+
+"Oh, yes, sir, I'm charmed with it," said the younger man; "but I'm
+sorry for the chaps that will have to fetch us back."
+
+"What do you mean?" asked his chief slowly.
+
+Terrington stretched out his hand into the soft night air.
+
+"It's summer here, sir," he said with seeming irrelevance, "and summer
+at Simla; summer for three full months.  It's summer at Sar too; but in
+four weeks there will be snow on the passes, on the Palári and Darai;
+and, in six, whoever goes out of Sar that way," and he nodded towards
+India, "goes because he must."
+
+"You think we may have to winter there?" asked Sir Colvin.
+
+"I took a liberal view of the time we might spend there, sir, and asked
+at Sampur for five hundred spare rounds a man."
+
+"Cartridges!" exclaimed the Commissioner.
+
+"Yes, sir.  Colonel Davis thought they might come in useful, and let me
+have what they had.  Then there was a Maxim they were doubtful
+about-----"
+
+"My good man!" broke in the other; "do you take this for an
+expeditionary force?"
+
+"No, sir," replied the soldier.  "I knew we were an escort, so I packed
+the Maxim on a mule.  There's a corner in the old fort at Sar, I
+remembered, that it would look well in: and I thought, if we had to
+spend the winter there, we might make the place as cosy as we could.  I
+meant to tell you, sir, as I had to requisition some extra transport,
+and I scheduled the lot as 'gifts for the Khan.'"
+
+"Well, I must say you're a cool hand!" gasped his chief.
+
+"I thought we'd be sure to let him have them if he came for them,"
+explained Terrington simply; "so it read all right.  I wasn't quite
+clear if a Maxim could be included under necessary equipment!"
+
+"Oh, you weren't, weren't you," exclaimed the other.  "And how do you
+think I'm to explain it?"
+
+"Wouldn't it come under my knowledge of the country of which you were
+to make the fullest use, sir?" was the innocent reply.
+
+Sir Colvin laughed, and the talk turned on what he held to be the
+peaceable possibilities of Sar.  On that subject Terrington could hold
+nothing but his tongue.  He was an adept at minding his own business,
+but he tried on the way up country to illuminate his chief's views of
+the men with whom he had to deal, by tales of Sari humour, which were
+mostly pointed by the decapitation or disembowelment of the humorist's
+best friend.
+
+At Sar the Mission found everything in silver paper.  It was met
+imposingly at the Gate of the Great Evil, ten miles below the city,
+where the river tears a way through rocks of black basalt, and had
+eaten there the salted cake of a sacred hospitality.
+
+It was welcomed into Sar by the bellowings of an unspeakable music, and
+for three days the bearers of gifts and good wishes wore a path through
+the Bazar between the Residency and the New Palace.
+
+Chantry reported a pleasing change in the Khan's bearing since the
+Mission had been appointed, his affability, attention to protests and
+anxiety for the comfort of the new comers.
+
+Out of this very consideration arose the first note of discord, owing,
+as Chantry put it under his breath, to Terrington's "damned
+pigheadedness."
+
+His own guard of Sikhs, Dogras and Bakót levies had been housed in the
+Old Palace, now called the Fort, a low mud and stone building, whose
+brown walls of astounding thickness rose hard upon the green tangle of
+chenar in which the Residency stood.  The little force fitted it as
+scantily as a wizened kernel fits its shell, and, although the river
+washed the Fort's eastern face and secured that from assault, was too
+scant to hold it.  The addition of the odd two hundred of the
+Commissioner's escort made defence quite another matter.
+
+The Khan knew that, and with many apologies for the lack of
+accommodation in the Fort, cleared out his own barracks on the other
+side of the river, and put them with immense affability and the stores
+they contained at Chantry's disposal for the escort's occupation.
+
+Chantry, unable ever to credit any one with less than his own share of
+honour, accepted gratefully on the Commissioner's behalf, glad to be
+relieved from a further cleansing of the Fort and from the pressing
+difficulty of provisions.
+
+He explained the arrangement to Sir Colvin, as the Guides swung out of
+the brown mob of Saris, past the guard of honour into the Residency
+compound, and formed front with their own undauntable swagger before
+Rose Chantry's smiling eyes.
+
+Aire listened attentively, with his eye on the frail figure in
+heliotrope on the verandah.
+
+"Sounds all that's desirable," he said; "but I'm not the one to settle
+it.  There's your man," he nodded, as Terrington rode up to report.
+
+Terrington's hard stare swept the city as the proposal was repeated, a
+grim smile darkening his mouth.
+
+"Very considerate of the old gentleman," he said slowly; "but I think
+we'll stay here."
+
+Chantry exploded with difficulties.  The Fort wasn't habitable; he
+couldn't face the question of supply; the Khan would be insulted; the
+difficulty of negotiations increased.  He turned to Sir Colvin
+imploringly, but the Commissioner shook his head.
+
+"Delegation of authority," he purred.  "Mine's political!"
+
+"But what am I to tell the Khan?" cried Chantry in expostulation.  "Am
+I to say that you're afraid?"
+
+Terrington's stare had included absently the other's face.
+
+"Tell the old fox," he said, "that I'm delighted to have a political
+officer to make my explanations.  Last time we met I had, as he'll
+remember, to make them myself."
+
+He asked Sir Colvin's permission to fall the men out for dinner, and
+rode back without a further word about the Fort.  He was unused in the
+matter of orders either to ask or answer questions.
+
+Chantry made a despairing but fruitless appeal to the Commissioner, who
+replied that, having entrusted Terrington with absolute discretion in
+the military affairs of the Mission, he could not interfere.
+
+"Good man," he concluded; "dam good man!  Can talk through my Pukhtu,
+and cooks like a chef.  You'll get used to him, if you stand in with
+him.  But he'd clear out the devil if he got in his way."
+
+Sir Colvin had learnt something from the daring fashion in which
+Terrington had held up the various Khels, ill-affected most of them,
+but all blandly amiable, from which the Mission had accepted
+hospitality on the road to Sar.
+
+He had fixed each, as he approached it, in a grip of steel; covered its
+avenues, commanded its towers, as if about to exterminate a nest of
+hornets; but he had entered with an air of unconcerned good-fellowship,
+as though the rifles ranged without to avenge him and the naked steel
+at his elbow had no real existence.
+
+"What's about the risk in these places?" Sir Colvin had asked on
+quitting one of the most forbidding.
+
+"Never can tell," replied Terrington with a shrug.  "Treachery with
+these chaps is like a hiccup.  It often comes as a surprise, even to
+the man who has it."
+
+"And don't they rather resent your precautions?"
+
+"Oh, not a bit! they admire them.  It's part of the style of a
+gentleman hereabouts to distrust your neighbour so explicitly that he
+daren't misbehave.  Prevents costly mistakes.  The etiquette is to show
+him you can murder him, and then to credit him genially with too much
+sense to put you to the trouble."
+
+The etiquette was complicated, as Terrington admitted, by the lasting
+advantages which infidel slaughter offers to one of the True Faith,
+very tempting to starving and houseless hill-men, with veins fired by a
+seductive Paradise.
+
+But etiquette, though worn once or twice a trifle thin, saw them safe
+into Sar, where Sir Colvin recognized in Terrington's insulting
+suspicions of his host the policy which had proved so curiously
+effective throughout their journey.
+
+Its observed success made him accept more readily the difficulties
+entailed, especially since Terrington seemed to expect no assistance in
+removing them.
+
+He set to work upon the Fort with the Bakót levies on the afternoon of
+his arrival, and began at the same time to organize a system of supply.
+He was at his desk, or directing alterations in the Fort until a late
+hour of the evening, eating his dinner with one hand and working with
+the other, so that he did not meet Rose Chantry till chota hazri next
+day.
+
+A wing of the Residency had been turned into mess and ante-rooms, and
+furnished the Commissioner with quarters.  Clones, the doctor, found
+lodging in another part of it, while Terrington, Walcot and Dore, his
+immediate subordinates, and Langford, who commanded the Sikh and Dogra
+detachments, made shift in an adjoining bungalow, and the native
+officers were sheltered by the Fort.
+
+It was still early when Terrington, already half through his morning's
+work, entered the mess-room; but only Mrs. Chantry remained beside the
+urn.  She wore a brown canvas habit, a hard straw hat, with the
+colours, scarlet and sage, of her husband's regiment.  She looked to
+him absurdly young and pretty for a woman in such a place; and he was
+provoked by the folly which permitted her to arrive there.  She was
+trying to look disdainfully indifferent.  She was proud of being the
+one Englishwoman in that utmost post of the Empire, and this man alone
+had appeared absolutely unconscious of her presence.
+
+"I suppose you're Captain Terrington," she said, turning towards him
+from the table; "as I was introduced yesterday to all the others?"
+
+"Yes," he smiled, "I'm Nevile Terrington: and it needs no supposing to
+give a name to you."
+
+"Really?" she said, reseating herself.  "I shouldn't have imagined you
+were aware of my existence."
+
+"All too well!" he sighed, smiling.  "There is nothing I would have
+sooner missed in Sar."
+
+She snapped back the tap of the samovar, and faced him in a pretty
+little blaze of petulance across the open teapot.
+
+"You would turn me out now if you could, I dare say," she cried.
+
+"This very hour," he assured her, his smile unruffled.  "But I can't.
+'Rien ne va plus,' as they say at another game.  Do you know what that
+means?"
+
+"At Monte Carlo?"
+
+"No! in Sar?  It means winter, I'm afraid."
+
+"Winter!" she exclaimed, her resentment embarrassed by the man's
+imperturbable temper, and her interest provoked by his voice.  "I'm
+going down with Sir Colvin."
+
+"Yes!" he said.  "And when will that be?"
+
+"When he's done here."
+
+"Yes!" he said again, "but that hardly puts a date to it.  I can give
+you one for the snow."
+
+"Look here!" she cried--and the little imperious words, with their
+little imperious manner, made suddenly a bond of battle between
+them--"you haven't been here a day, and you've set every one foaming.
+Do you know that?"
+
+"Yes," he said humbly.  "I'm afraid I've put my foot into it all round."
+
+"Well!" she exclaimed.  "Do you want me against you too?"
+
+He shook his head gravely.
+
+"Heaven forbid!" he said.  "But you're against me already."
+
+She rose, lifted her riding-whip from the table and took her skirt in
+her hand.
+
+"Yes, I am!" she said.
+
+She moved towards the verandah, visible through the carved screen of
+wood that filled a part of the wall: stopping before a quaint Cashmiri
+mirror that hung upon it to set her hat straight and tie her veil.
+
+Terrington's eyes followed her as he stirred his tea.
+
+"Where do you ride?" he asked, as she went towards the door.
+
+She turned in the entrance, facing him, against the crimson folds of
+the purdah.
+
+"Everywhere," she said.
+
+"You'll have to give it up," he announced tranquilly.
+
+She stood an instant longer, her lithe brown figure framed in the
+curtains' crimson and gold, to let him realize the defiance under her
+lowered eyelids and the scorn of her little lifted chin.  Then she
+pushed back the purdah and stepped out into the sun.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Whatever regret may have sounded in Terrington's admission, he did
+nothing to mitigate the inconvenience of the boot he had thrust into
+Sar.
+
+He reorganized the service of spies which had been of such use to him
+five years before; but the difficulties in picking up the threads,
+which had then been complacent to his fingers, taught him more than was
+told by those on which he could lay his hands.
+
+The rise in the price of treachery, and the trivial details it could
+profess to furnish, warned him not only of the nearness and wide-spread
+intimation of an outbreak, but of a native confidence in its success.
+He had sufficient belief in the extractive qualities of a bribe to
+expect a few days' notice of the final explosion, when a knowledge of
+the plot should have reached the more servile of his informants.
+Meanwhile he could only listen to its developments in the dark.
+
+On the surface there was no sign of trouble, save the difficulty of
+obtaining audience of the Khan, and his disinclination, when cornered,
+to talk treaties.  There was much futile arrangement and re-arrangement
+of durbar; Mir Khan refusing to discuss politics anywhere but in the
+Palace, and Terrington being equally determined to provide them with
+quite another carpet.
+
+Meanwhile the most amiable appearances were preserved, and polo was
+played three days a week on the ground beyond the Fort.
+
+Within that gloomy building alterations of a significant kind were in
+progress, but the only visible addition was a dado in art paper round
+some of the walls.
+
+The paper had been appropriated, from the medley of gifts collected for
+the Khan by some humorist at headquarters, by Terrington, who said he
+had a more pressing use for it.
+
+Chantry, when he discovered that all the pressing was to be done on the
+mud walls of the Fort, objected petulantly to this curtailment of his
+stock of presents, which the Khan's policy of postponements had almost
+exhausted.
+
+Terrington replied drily that the paper was marked 'sanitary,' and that
+the condition of the Fort when handed over to him was the reverse of
+that: hence his use of it.
+
+He did not point out further that a stick drawn along the dado in a
+certain direction would have revealed a series of gaps in the mud work
+behind it; and that if the point of the stick were used vigorously to
+sound such gaps a lightly mortared stone would have fallen outwards
+from each of them, and the Fort become a better ventilated and
+loop-holed building.
+
+Concealment was so essential to the undertaking that only Sir Colvin,
+Afzul Singh, Terrington's trusted Subadar, and the sappers who did the
+work were in the secret.  Other noises had to be contrived to cover the
+daily perforations, and only in darkness could the final drilling of
+the walls be done: the outmost portion being replaced and the dado
+extended before dawn.
+
+Sir Colvin did not appreciate these preparations; but he could not
+condemn them.  They meant a winter's defence of Sar Fort against
+overwhelming odds, and that was not a pretty thing to contemplate.
+
+An uglier one, however, was to face those odds unprepared, and be
+himself responsible for the improvidence.
+
+So his consent was given, as an insurance on his reputation, but he
+wished that Terrington's prevision had been more accommodating or less
+acute.
+
+So far, however, as the Commissioner was forced to admit, they had been
+justified by results.  Nothing had come of the Mission, and nothing
+seemed to be on its way.  More than a month had gone by in Sar, and
+though the sun still filled its sheltered valley with a summer heat,
+snow had fallen on the eastern passes; and, visibly from the hills
+about it, the everlasting whiteness of the northern peaks was spreading
+in frozen silence towards the plain.
+
+Terrington had watched that whiteness, knowing what it meant, and, half
+ashamed of himself, hoping what it meant.
+
+It was for the falling of that icy portcullis, he felt, that Sar was
+waiting: waiting till it closed across their chance of escape, across
+their hope of rescue.
+
+Then the gathering conspiracy would burst: burst, as it supposed, on
+unprepared defenders; and the end would rest with him.  It would be a
+siege, whatever its outcome, as great as any that had lived in story,
+and the man who saw it through would need no further fame.
+
+He was a cavalryman; but this was his ideal of combat: a fight which
+should test every quality of manhood; a struggle through months of
+despairing vigilance with unconquerable hordes.
+
+Yet though he saw in such a siege the rare chance of a lifetime, a
+chance for which his life had waited, he tried with an astounding
+probity to make it impossible.
+
+"I believe," he told Sir Colvin on the question of secret
+fortification, "I believe that we can hold Sar Fort for at least ten
+weeks, if my plans are carried out; but, if I may say it to you, sir, I
+think we have no business to try."
+
+Asked his reason, he expressed the conviction that the game of military
+glory in Sar wasn't worth the candle of men's lives which would be
+burnt in an attempt to relieve it in mid-winter.
+
+"Your word, then, is go?" asked the Commissioner.
+
+"Yes, sir.  Make the immediate discussion of the treaty the condition
+of your remaining, and let the Khan realize how his refusal will be
+understood.
+
+This place can be wiped out cheaply enough next summer; but if our
+chaps have to slam up here through the snow they'll lose two men for
+every one they save."
+
+"And how are we to go?" asked the other.
+
+"Oh; by the Palári," replied the soldier.  it "By the Palári!"
+exclaimed Sir Colvin.  "Why the snow's over it already."
+
+"Yes, sir; but Gale is at this end of it in Rashát.  What's to happen
+to him if we creep out by the south?"
+
+But the Commissioner shook his head, to Terrington's intense relief.
+That last argument clinched his decision.  The Government which put him
+into the pickle must take him out of it.  He was not going to fight his
+way home with three hundred men through the snows of the Palári and
+between the desolate precipices of Maristan, where once in ancient days
+an army had melted like the spring water upon its courses.  So
+Terrington returned to his loopholes, and Sir Colvin to that merry
+little messroom in the shade of the chenar where all the trifling rites
+of home were observed with such an exacting deference, and the chances
+of the morrow debated with a boy's disdain.  The dinner table, however,
+could show a feature which would have been unusual elsewhere, since a
+woman sat in its seat of honour.
+
+When Mrs. Chantry had made over her two best rooms for the use of the
+Mission, its members had elected her to the presidency of their mess,
+and despite the charming shyness with which she took the chair she had
+converted it at once into a throne.
+
+Most of her subjects would have welcomed the wildest folly on her
+behalf, and not one would have missed without dismay the light
+whiteness of her presence in the breakfast-room, or the lithe figure
+with its girlish shoulders which rose every evening from the square
+black chair at the head of the table and lifted a glass above its
+golden head to pledge their memories to their Queen.  It is possible
+that, as they touched glasses against the one her white arm held across
+the cloth, they vowed a more immediate homage than the toast
+proclaimed; but then a soldier's homage has often so many vicarious
+shades.
+
+Of Terrington Mrs. Chantry saw far less than of the rest.  He made no
+occasions to meet her, and never offered himself as an escort for the
+rides which he had not yet proscribed.  She saw him at polo--and he was
+worth seeing at polo--at dinner, and occasionally in the morning, when
+she was in time to pour out his tea.
+
+For the remainder of the day he was buried in the Fort.  But she
+learnt, chiefly through her husband, the part his counsel played in Sir
+Colvin's decisions, especially when that was, as mostly, in direct
+disagreement with Lewis Chantry's mind.
+
+Of that mind his wife had never taken a too imposing measure, but she
+espoused it now even when obviously at fault.
+
+She used it to provide causes for a quarrel with Nevile Terrington, and
+she despised it for starting her almost always in the wrong.
+
+She would have been puzzled, perhaps, to give a reason for her enmity,
+and might have said that it dated from the moment she had seen him.
+But it had really an earlier origin--the moment when she expected, and
+did not see him; and it was kept alive by his absolute indifference to
+her beauty and her opinion.
+
+Her supreme object was to show herself stronger than he, to thwart his
+plans, to make him repent having dared to ignore her.
+
+For he would not take her seriously enough to explain his intentions.
+He treated her as a child; as though there were a world of things that
+could not be put into speech for her.  He was for ever filling up
+spaces, where the matter was beyond her with the asterisks of a smile.
+
+But while he was in Sar her efforts were of no avail.
+
+Terrington could detect her secret influence in the sayings of all the
+men about her, even in Sir Colvin's tentative suggestions; but beyond
+creating a dull hostility to his plans and policy she could do nothing.
+
+She tried to draw from him at mess some declaration that would irritate
+the others, but Terrington, though apparently indifferent to their
+irritations, only laughed at her attempts.
+
+It was when, by a sudden intermission in the supplies on which he had
+counted for provisioning the Fort, Terrington was obliged to leave Sar
+in order to put personal persuasion on his agents in the country round,
+that Rose Chantry saw her chance, and took it.
+
+The decision she could most effect was, she saw instantly, that of the
+Durbar.
+
+Every one was chafing under the restrictions which Terrington had
+imposed; every one was anxious to have the crisis over, and the future
+settled one way or another.  Aire's urgent representations had been
+shelved by a harassed Viceroy in the fatuous hope of something turning
+up to save expense and excuse his vacillations.
+
+The eastern passes were already under snow, the southern would be white
+with it in a fortnight longer.  If a winter in Sar were to be avoided
+something must be done at once, and, since no one but Terrington
+anticipated hostilities, a winter in Sar was the last thing they wished.
+
+Rose Chantry found, in consequence, ground sown ready to her hand: and
+she fed it with a fertilizer which is always effective--a woman's smile
+at man's unvalorous hesitations.
+
+In this case, probably, it only precipitated the harvest; but
+precipitation was essential.
+
+On the third day of Terrington's absence the Durbar was proclaimed.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The Durbar had been announced only a few hours previous to Terrington's
+return, but Rose Chantry had had the news of it from her husband on the
+previous evening.
+
+Consequently, when Nevile, so long before he was expected, entered the
+ante-room, she was quite at home with her triumph and only surprised by
+the chance of thrusting it into his face.
+
+When, half ashamed of having harried such a hungry man, she had flown
+into the mess-room to find food for him, Terrington sat staring at the
+white chunam walls, softly aglow with the sunlight that blazed outside.
+A window in one of them framed a space of blue sky, the greenness of a
+chenar, and, squatted on the ground beneath it, Rose Chantry's ayah,
+swinging a glass bead tied to the lowest bough.  He was too tired to
+think of the news he had heard, or to keep his thoughts from following
+the woman who had told it.  He realized with a numb surprise how many
+memories of her remained in the queer glimmer of that empty room.  How
+much he remembered which he thought to have forgotten, and which, he
+was not too tired to tell himself, he ought to have forgotten.
+
+Whichever way he looked he could see her figure in one of its airy
+poses, coquettishly sweet or coquettishly defiant; smiling, pouting,
+mocking, or fancifully grave.  The other figures in those groups, men
+all of them, had faded; hers remained.  A white spirit that filled the
+place for him.
+
+He shut his eyes to shut it out; but found the likeness was on the
+other side of his lids.
+
+He lifted them quickly at a laugh from the mess-room doorway through
+which Rose Chantry was leaning, with a tatty in either hand pressed
+against her shoulders and her golden head in the gap.
+
+"Didn't mean to wake you," she said, smiling, "but there's some cold
+chikor.  Will that do?"
+
+"Nothing better," he replied.
+
+"Well, you'd better have it where you are," she announced with a glance
+across her shoulder; "they're hanging a new ceiling cloth in here, and
+there's no end of a litter."
+
+As her head withdrew with a shrill call to the kitmatgah, Sir Colvin
+and Chantry entered from the verandah.
+
+The Commissioner, with the sense of nakedness which men have felt so
+often since the days of Eve from following a woman's counsel, wished,
+on learning of Terrington's arrival, to confront him personally with
+the news of the Durbar.  So after he had seated himself and listened to
+what could be told him on the prospects of supply, he put the question
+with an exaggerated imitation of his own bluffness.
+
+"Well!  I suppose you've heard of the Durbar?"
+
+"I'm afraid, sir," said the other, "I've been too hungry to hear of
+anything but breakfast.  It's to be cold chikor," he added, smiling, as
+Rose Chantry, followed by the kitmatgah, made a muslin whiteness in the
+mess room-door.
+
+She heard the cheerful lie with a flash of admiration for the man who
+spoke it.
+
+So many beaten men, she knew, would have jumped at the peevish chance
+to hit back, especially when the hard truth to hit with was in their
+hands.
+
+"Well," continued Sir Colvin, saluting Mrs. Chantry and reseating
+himself, as the tray was laid before Terrington, "I decided, as no
+reply came to my last demand, some sort of move must be made at once,
+if we weren't to be boxed here all the winter.  So, as there was no
+chance of ferreting the Khan out of that hole of his, we're going to
+talk him into reason over there."
+
+Terrington, with his knife in the partridge, looked up and nodded.
+
+"I suppose the plan's no more to your mind than ever?" queried the
+Commissioner.
+
+"No, sir," said his military adviser.  "I think it's even less."
+
+"How! from what you've heard?" exclaimed Sir Colvin.
+
+"No," said the soldier slowly; "from what I haven't heard.  There's no
+talk in the hills; and when a Sari man's dumb, he's either got
+something to say, or something not to say it."
+
+"Hang it all!" cried Chantry.  "I wonder if there's anything that you
+wouldn't think a bad sign?"
+
+Aire shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Well! the die's cast," he said; "and we've got to see the thing
+through.  The only question left is one of escort.  We want to look
+imposing but not belligerent.  What do you think?"
+
+"The smaller the better," said Terrington drily.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You can't take enough to make it safe for you," explained the other;
+"but you can take enough to make it unsafe for us."
+
+"For _you_?" Sir Colvin asked.
+
+"Suppose you don't come back?" was Terrington's reply.
+
+"Gad! but you're a cheerful counsellor," cried Chantry hotly.
+
+"If they murder us, eh," said Aire.
+
+"And you think they mean to, Captain Terrington?" asked Rose Chantry.
+
+Terrington shook his head.
+
+"Not to-morrow!" he said.  "Mir Khan wouldn't expect to get the chance."
+
+"You mean he doesn't believe we're such unqualified fools as to go
+there?" Sir Colvin suggested.
+
+"That's probably how he puts it," said Terrington blandly.
+
+"Well that gives us a chance the more," Chantry threw in.
+
+"A chance the less, I think," said Terrington.  "Blood is always a Sari
+man's first thought, and he'll leave no time for a second."
+
+The agent's dark eyes glowered with a whole-souled malediction, but Sir
+Colvin, tapping on the table, watched in silence for some seconds while
+Terrington finished his meal.
+
+"Do you still try to dissuade me?" he asked at length.
+
+"Not at all, sir," replied the other.  "I was only thinking of the
+escort.  If they mean murder over there they'll mean it the more the
+more of you there are."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Supposing they intend to go for us, they'll wait till all the passes
+are closed, and we're cut off.  In that case they'll hardly give away
+their game now, unless they get a chance to cripple us."
+
+"Twenty men would be enough?"
+
+"Ample," said Terrington.  "And I'd keep as many of them outside as
+possible."
+
+"Yes; and you might pick some of your own men for the job."
+
+Terrington's face hardened.  His men were his children, and he hated to
+let them run a risk which he could not share.
+
+"In that case I'd ask the honour of going with you, sir," he said.
+
+Sir Colvin shook his head.
+
+"No, no!" he answered.  "The Fort is your business, and it may prove a
+big one.  Chantry is going in with me, and Langford, who's an old
+cavalryman, will take the escort.  I've sent down word of what I'm
+doing, but I'll leave a fuller account with you, in case anything goes
+wrong."  He turned with Chantry to leave the room, calling back from
+the doorway: "By the way, the polo's to come off to-morrow afternoon as
+we arranged.  You're playing, aren't you?"
+
+"Yes, sir," replied the other, watching the two figures pass out of the
+verandah, and seem to shrink as they were immersed in the fierce yellow
+of the sun.
+
+Then he turned, and met Rose Chantry's eyes.
+
+She had flung herself into a long chair: her knees were crossed; her
+head thrown back; her hands clasped behind it.  To Terrington's vision
+the tip of her toe, her knee and her chin were in a line; and the
+absurd little sole of her shoe, with its elfin instep and the arch curl
+of its heel, made a print on his memory in which it was afterwards to
+tread.
+
+"Well!" she said, with her tantalizing smile, "was the chikor good?"
+
+"Excellent," he answered.
+
+Her lips fluttered like the wings of a bird.
+
+"Didn't it taste of defeat?" she suggested, the dark lids drooping over
+her eyes.
+
+"No," he said gravely, "it tasted extremely game."
+
+She swept him with her covert glances, but his had fallen to her foot.
+
+"Why did you tell that lie?" she asked presently.
+
+He looked up into her face for an instant.
+
+"I've forgotten," he said.
+
+"Sir Colvin wouldn't have suspected me," she added.  "He knows no more
+about a woman than ... than you do.
+
+"I suppose that leaves him without much knowledge to boast of?" he
+reflected.
+
+"Yes," she said; "it does."
+
+She tilted her head sideways to see, beyond her knee, on what his eyes
+were fixed.  She tossed her foot clear of the muslin flounces, and then
+with a curious twist of the ankle brought it round into her view.
+
+"What's wrong with it?" she asked.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"How should I know?" he said thoughtfully.  "It wasn't made for me."
+
+She laughed, slowly twirling her foot, as though fascinated by its
+suppleness, or by the gleaming creases of the silk that covered it.
+Then, with a little jerk of her knee, she let it settle again into the
+froth of flounces.
+
+"Really," she said, "for a man who says so little, you do say the
+strangest things."
+
+His eyes had wandered again to the square of open air, the picture in
+azure and ochre and emerald which the window made in the wall.  The
+brown woman still sat swinging her bead in the shade of the chenar.
+Terrington could see its glassy blueness as it dipped to and fro across
+a splinter of sunlight.
+
+Rose Chantry, with her eyes on his profile, asked him at what he was
+looking.
+
+He told her.
+
+"I know!" she exclaimed.  "Why is she always doing that?"
+
+"She wants a child," he said.
+
+"But she has one."
+
+"Another then."
+
+She gave a shudder.
+
+"What strange things women are!" she cried.
+
+His eyes came round to her, and she felt a coldness in them like the
+green gleam of ice.
+
+"Out here, you see," he said quietly, "women are still as fond of
+making men as of making fools of them."
+
+"Why do you say that?" she asked sharply.
+
+"I could think of nothing better," he replied.
+
+"Why did you say it to _me_?" she persisted.
+
+"To whom else could I have said it?" he enquired blandly.
+
+The blaze of anger seemed to fill her eyes with a floating sparkle of
+fresh colours, and her lips closed tightly, as though to repress a
+desire to bite him.  Then she met his glance and laughed.
+
+"I wonder why you dislike me so," she said.
+
+"I don't dislike you," he replied.
+
+"Oh, well!" she sighed, "why don't you dislike me, then; since you seem
+too?  You wish I wasn't here!"
+
+"Very much," he admitted.
+
+"Why?  What harm do I do?"
+
+"Haven't you told me that this morning?"
+
+"No!" she cried.  "You weren't thinking of that; you know you weren't.
+You believe that would have happened anyhow.  It was what you meant
+about making fools of men."
+
+"Well," he said, "don't you make fools of them?"
+
+She shook her head softly.
+
+"My mistake then," he said.
+
+"Ah!" she sighed, "but you don't think so.  I daresay you think
+something much more horrid of me than you care to say.  And it ought to
+have been rather nice for you all, having me up here."
+
+"Yes," he said, "I think it ought."
+
+She looked at him doubtfully, crumpling her lips together in her
+fingers.
+
+"But you _do_ make mistakes," she went on retrospectively.
+
+"Yes," he said, "one makes everything of them."
+
+She regarded him for a moment in the light of the remark, before adding:
+
+"You told me, the first time you saw me, I must give up riding."
+
+"Yes," he admitted, smiling; "that was one of them.  But I found that
+your riding could be of use to us."
+
+"Of use to _you_?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, in creating a false impression."
+
+"An impression of what?"
+
+"Of security: that we did not think you were in any danger."
+
+"Though you thought I was?"
+
+"I was sure of it," he said.
+
+She was sitting upright now; her hands set upon the chair-arms; her
+face changing stormily between anger and astonishment.
+
+"You were sure I was in danger, yet you did nothing to prevent it!" she
+cried.  "Do you mean that?"
+
+"What should I have done?" he enquired.
+
+"Warned me!" she said
+
+"But didn't I?"
+
+"Oh, that!" she exclaimed impatiently.
+
+"And would you have been warned?"
+
+"I don't know.  I can't say.  That's got nothing to do with it.  Or you
+could have given me an escort."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"That would have made you no safer, and would have spoilt you as an
+advertisement."
+
+"As an advertisement!" she protested hotly.  "Do soldiers let a woman
+run the risk of being murdered to make things safe far them?  I think
+it's contemptible!"
+
+"Yes," he said quietly; "so I see: but you don't think enough."
+
+He sat looking at her in a way she detested; as no other man seemed
+able to look at her; as though she were a piece in a game he played.
+
+"Did any one else know it wasn't safe for me?" she demanded.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Wouldn't you have been warned in that case?" he suggested.
+
+"Yes," she returned warmly, "I'm quite certain I should."
+
+"I think so too," he said.  "Nothing in Sar would have been weighed
+beside it."
+
+"Except by you," she retorted.
+
+"Except by me," he said.  "You see I'm here to weigh things.  I'm here
+to look after you all.  You think I should have told you of your
+danger, and shut you up in the safety of Sar.  But there is no safety
+in Sar.  That's the mistake.  Your riding was a risk, but it helped our
+chance to make Sar safer; safer for every one, safer for _you_."
+
+"And suppose I had been killed?"
+
+"Well," he said, "you can fancy what I should have paid for it.  But
+the safety would have been there, though it was only there for others.
+And it was to make that that I am here."
+
+She met his musing observation of her with hard clear eyes.
+
+"Haven't you wasted an unusual lot of time talking to me this morning,
+Captain Terrington?" she said.
+
+He took the deep breath of a man whose heart is sick for sleep, and
+threw back his shoulders.
+
+"Yes," he smiled, rising; "I was quite exceptionally tired."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Terrington gave a practical shape to his forebodings as soon as the
+Commissioner and his escort started for the Durbar.
+
+The entire force was under arms; the Residency guard was trebled;
+sappers were stationed in every room to break open the loopholes;
+others waited with discs of guncotton to blow away the trees which
+masked the polo ground; and the final connexions were made with the
+mine which was to overthrow the courtyard wall.
+
+Appearances were kept up by an attenuated fatigue party, which was as
+markedly visible about the place as the rest of the garrison was not.
+
+Terrington, who had changed for polo, also made a peacefully
+indifferent figure as he strolled across to the mess-room and round the
+Residency garden, with a loose coat drawn over his riding-shirt, whose
+blue and silver showed in the scarf about his throat.
+
+He had returned to his orderly-room in the Fort, when news of the
+tragedy which was to wring from England a growl of vengeance was
+brought to the sentries at the Residency gate by the handful of
+blood-smeared horsemen who swept through it with broken and clotted
+lances and a crimson lather on their horses' flanks.
+
+Hussain Shah was holding Langford, mortally hurt, in the saddle, his
+huge figure swinging limply to and fro, and more than half that remnant
+of the escort reeled as they drew rein before the Residency door.
+
+Terrington was not the first to hear of the disaster, but he heard it
+in the most dramatic fashion; from Mrs. Chantry's lips.
+
+She had torn across the compound as the Lancers came to a blundering
+halt before the mess-room entrance, and dashed breathless into the
+orderly room, waiting no confirmation of the story that was told by
+their plight.
+
+She caught at her side, clutching with the other hand at the table, and
+for an instant panted, speechless, her face white as jasmine, above a
+big bow of creamy lace.
+
+Then, with a hard gasp of breath:
+
+"They're killed!" she cried.
+
+Terrington had sprung to his feet as she burst in upon him.
+
+"Who are?" he demanded.
+
+"Lewis and Sir Colvin," she panted, "and ... and most of the others.
+All but six or seven of them.  Mr. Langford's there, but he's simply
+hacked; and all the men are streaming."
+
+A long thin wail broke from her with the horror of what she had seen,
+and she covered her eyes with both her hands.
+
+Terrington had stepped towards the doorway as he realized the
+significance of what she had seen.  She put herself sharply in front of
+him, her head flung fiercely back.
+
+"What are you going to do?" she demanded.  "You let them go like that,
+you _made_ them go like that!  That's what's done it all!  You wouldn't
+let them take the men!  Aren't you going to try to save them?  They
+mayn't be dead!  Don't you think they mayn't be dead?  If only you'll
+go at once; this moment!  Take every one and smash them.  Don't you
+think it's possible; just possible?  And it wasn't I who did it, was
+it? was it really?"
+
+He laid a hand upon her shoulder to put her aside.
+
+"No, child," he said gently; "you had nothing to do with it."
+
+As he would have passed out, leaping footsteps sounded on the stairs,
+and Captain Walcot almost dashed into his arms.
+
+"Have you heard?" he cried.
+
+"What?" asked Terrington
+
+Walcot glanced with deprecation at Mrs. Chantry's figure.
+
+"Say what you know!" said Terrington.
+
+"Sir Colvin and Chantry have been murdered at the Durbar, and all the
+men they took in with them."
+
+"Who told you?" said Terrington.
+
+"Hussain Shah," replied the other excitedly.  "Langford was in the
+courtyard with half the escort, when a yelling began inside the hall,
+and a swarm of those brown swine poured out shouting that Sir Colvin
+was killed, and attacked him.  Langford charged, and tried to jam them
+in the doorway; but the crowd joined in behind, and when Langford was
+shot through the body Hussain retired 'em, and they had to cut their
+way through till they were clear of the Bazaar.  Every man of them was
+wounded, and they've lost five and Langford's dying."
+
+"Is Clones with him?"
+
+Walcot nodded.
+
+Terrington remained a moment without speaking, gazing almost absently
+through the window in the thick mud wall at the green grove of chenar.
+In his loose racing-coat above polo boots and breeches, and with the
+gay silk scarf at his throat, he suggested anything but a man suddenly
+met by a great emergency.
+
+"Tell Subadar Afzul Singh," he said slowly, "to post the Fort guard,
+break out the loopholes and put the place at once in a state of
+defence.  You will parade every other available man in the courtyard
+within half an hour, in marching order a hundred and fifty rounds a
+man.  Dore will take over Langford's Sikhs and Dogras; the Bakót levies
+will reinforce the Fort guard.  Send Risaldar Hussain Shah to me here."
+
+Rose Chantry held her sobbing breath in astonishment at the note of
+control which had come into the man's voice.  It was lower and softer
+than she had ever heard it, but it spoke with a quiet and assured
+authority which seemed to master her even while it addressed another.
+
+Walcot felt it too.  He was the elder of the two men, and but a few
+months junior in the service; they had lived together for some time on
+terms of perfect equality, yet now, though Terrington had made no
+reference to a change in their relations, Walcot's heels came together
+while the other was speaking, and his hand went to his cap with a "Very
+good, sir" as Nevile ended.
+
+The phrase, the sudden change of relation, Walcot's retreating figure,
+disciplined and subordinate, produced on Rose Chantry a very curious
+effect.
+
+"Are you going to take over the command?" she said to Terrington, who
+had seated himself at his desk and was writing rapidly.
+
+He turned his head and looked at her, his mind evidently occupied with
+an interrupted thought.
+
+"I have taken it over," he said quietly, turning again to his pen.
+
+She watched him for a moment.  His silence, his unconcern, his power,
+were all alike beyond her.
+
+"Are you going to the Palace?" she asked at length.
+
+He looked round at her again, as clearly preoccupied as before, but
+without irritation.
+
+"You will save them, won't you, if you can?" she went on imploringly,
+to force the subject into his mind.
+
+"Yes," he said slowly, "I'm going to the Palace."  Then after a pause,
+but with his eyes still upon her, "Mr. Clones would probably be very
+glad of some help with the wounded."
+
+"The wounded!" she repeated with a little shudder.
+
+"Yes," he said; "you'll see a good deal of them during the next few
+days, and it's as well to be of use.  If you'll take this to him," he
+went on, folding up a note, "he'll show you what to do.  It's only the
+making up of bandages," he continued, as she held back; "the time left
+us is very short."
+
+Something scornful had come into his voice, though ever so faintly, and
+something compelling as well.  She took the note when he held it out to
+her, unable, despite her will, to do anything else.  As she passed the
+doorway Hussain Shah appeared on the landing beyond it, the folds of
+the turban above his temple stiff with blood.  She paused an instant to
+hear Terrington's greeting, but the greeting was in Pukhtu, which she
+did not understand.  Had she understood, her opinion of Terrington's
+hardness would have been confirmed, for no reference was made to the
+wounded man's condition until he had received his orders.
+
+"Are you fit for duty?" said Terrington simply.
+
+"I am unhurt, sir," replied the other as he saluted.
+
+Half an hour later every available man in the force was paraded in the
+courtyard of the Fort.  Walcot with his Lancers in front; then, behind
+Terrington, the Sikhs and Dogras that could be spared from the Fort,
+the Guides bringing up the rear.  The Maxim had been hoisted on to the
+roof of the Eastern Tower, whence it covered for a certain distance an
+advance on the Palace.  In the silence the blow of a pick could be
+heard, and the falling stones from the last loopholes in the walls.
+
+Terrington sat his horse immovably, waiting for the signal from Afzul
+Singh which should open the gates.  He was burning with a dull anger
+against the circumstance in which he had been placed, and against the
+folly of the men who had created it.  He knew that in marching on the
+Palace to demand the men who had entered it that morning he was
+imperilling the safety of his entire force; yet he knew, too, that
+sentimental England would never forgive his sanity in declining the
+risk should any of Sir Colvin's party happen to be still alive.  He had
+no hope of their safety.  He was too well acquainted with the temper in
+which they had been attacked.  That he viewed with no resentment
+whatever.  It had been a piece of the foulest treachery, but treachery
+was a virtue in Sar, and he was quite able to accept, and even to
+respect, alien standards of conduct.
+
+What did anger him was the stolid British arrogance which declined to
+make allowance for any prejudices but its own, and thought beneath its
+dignity all considerations which were not in the terms of its own
+intelligence.  Rose Chantry watched him from the orderly-room window
+which overlooked the courtyard.  She had been in the surgery helping
+Clones to make up first-aid bandages, but the tramp of laden men down
+the long passages, and the roll, like a soft volley, of grounded butts
+in the dust as the men fell in, so wrought on her excitement that she
+left her work and ran up the narrow twisted stairs to the room from
+which half an hour earlier Terrington had sent her.
+
+She watched him now, with her shoulder pressed against the yellow
+chunam wall and her head drawn back in order not to be seen, wondering
+how a man of his dominant authority could wait impassively at such a
+moment the arrangements of a subordinate.
+
+Her eyes, dry and hot, seemed almost to repudiate resentfully the tears
+which she had shed; a pulse throbbed like the flutter of a moth at her
+throat; her uneasy fingers seemed to crave to be closed, and yet when
+she clenched her fist they ached to be opened.  She longed to tear
+about, to give orders, to rouse enthusiasm.  She would have liked to
+ride beside Terrington to the Palace and carry a flag: and the thought
+of how he would regard such a proposal moved her not to a sense of its
+humour but to renewed irritation with the man who could ride as
+indifferently to death as he would to a dinner.
+
+Her whole being was in disorder owing to the uncertainty of her
+husband's fate.  At the first shock and accepted inference of his death
+tears had burst from her in the weak wretchedness of bereavement, the
+sense of widowhood, and grief at the dying of one so near to her in the
+pride of his youth.  It was perhaps the very nearness of death's-knife,
+the cutting off of the one who was one with her, who had scarcely gone
+from her arms, which gave her the keenest shudder.  The sword which had
+been thrust through him seemed almost to have pricked her breast.  Not
+that she feared for her own safety; she never imagined that it was
+compromised.  She had the supreme British scorn for her country's foes,
+and thought it was only a question of policy whether Terrington with
+his handful of men would not at once burn the Palace to the ground,
+carry off the Khan in chains, and ravage the whole country with sword
+and fire.
+
+It was death in the shadow which had stabbed and was gone which made
+her shiver.  A thing so swift, so sudden, so unforeseen mocked the
+comfortable security of life.
+
+But with the fitting out of the expedition and speculation on the
+possible safety of those in the Palace, her emotions became dreadfully
+perplexed.  She had perforce to cease mourning a husband who might be
+still alive, and with the disappearance of a reason for her sorrow she
+began to wonder what had caused it.
+
+Had she cried because she loved him or because he was killed?  She had
+not a doubt while she thought him dead, but the chance of his being
+alive seemed to have altered everything.  Last night she would have
+disowned indignantly the idea that she did not love him.  She had
+accepted him as naturally in the order of needful things as food and
+clothing.  He was her husband and so had everything that husbands have,
+did everything that husbands do.  She had never thought about it as a
+personal matter.  One had a husband as one had a cold in the head; one
+didn't always quite know why; but having him one accepted him for the
+sort of thing he was.
+
+Lewis had taken her from a life already wearily dull, and with every
+prospect of becoming duller.  He had come suddenly into her
+existence--a quite unlooked-for excitement; and had transplanted her
+into surroundings more exciting still; full of men, and dangers, and
+pageants and great affairs.  It was so full indeed, that in the press
+of things to do he was a good deal crowded out.  His work, his fresh
+appointments--for he had been tremendously in demand--gave him rather
+the air of continually arranging new scenes and effects in which she
+played the leading lady.
+
+She didn't in the least so consciously regard him; she had not even
+noticed how much his work kept him out of the occasions which she most
+enjoyed; he seemed just a part of the delightful movement, a sort of
+dashing high-spirited hot-tempered ambitious concentration of it all.
+He was the man who had made it all possible for her, being her husband.
+That was how, gratefully, she most often thought of him.
+
+His death wrenched her by its treacherous horror; but it had put no
+awkward questions.  The questions came with the doubt if he were dead.
+How much did she care for him?  Did she care for him at all?  Had she
+ever cared for him as a husband?  Right on the heels of that, answering
+it to her astounded perception, came a shrinking of disgust that she
+had lived three years with a man as his wife without loving him;
+without even discovering that she did not love him.  It was that which
+seared the tears in her eyes, and left her with a sense of shame and
+self-disdain and loneliness indescribable.
+
+It was that too in a curious reflected fashion which increased her
+anger at Terrington's quiet indifference to the ways of Fate.  She
+could picture Lewis Chantry's raging vehemence under a like provocation.
+
+As she watched the silent mass of men in the courtyard--the dull yellow
+of the field-service kit lightened by the gay alkalaks of the Lancers,
+the orange and white of their pennons, the glistening of the sun upon
+lance-head and bayonet, the silence broken only by the clink of a
+bridoon as some impatient horse flung up its head--there was a burst of
+blue and red above the eastern tower and the Union Jack flew out above
+the Fort.
+
+It was the signal that Afzul Singh had completed his defences.  Walcot
+rode back to Terrington and saluted.  Terrington nodded.  With a
+sparkle of light on their lances, the horsemen were in the saddle, the
+rifles leapt to the 'carry,' and were swung on to the shoulder,
+cresting the infantry with the shimmer of steel; the gates were thrown
+open, the Lancers passed through and extended, the Sikhs and Dogras
+wheeled outwards after them in column of fours, followed by the Guides.
+
+As the gates closed behind the last section a sharp explosion rang out,
+followed by others in quick succession.
+
+Rose Chantry started and stood quivering in tense excitement; then
+darted across the room to the further window, which looked towards the
+polo ground through a green fringe of chenar.
+
+As she reached it there was another rending uproar almost under her
+feet, and a tree leapt into the air from beneath the window and fell
+with a crashing ruin of its branches towards the river.
+
+Afzul Singh was converting the screen of chenar into an abattis with
+discs of gun cotton, but to Rose the trees seemed to be falling before
+the enemy's shells, and she ran hurriedly to the eastern tower to get a
+view of the besiegers, and found there Afzul Singh himself, who
+explained her mistake.
+
+A sand-bag revetment crowned the top of the tower, and the loopholes on
+either side of the Maxim were manned by picked shots.  All were
+intently watching the occasional glimpse of colour or gleam of steel
+which marked the progress of Terrington's force through the Bazaar.
+
+Now that the din of the detonations had ceased not a sound broke the
+silence; the city lay listless and without a sign of life in the haze
+of its noontide heat.  The dust rose on the heels of the column as it
+emerged from the Bazaar and filtered through the collection of low mud
+buildings beyond it.  Clear of these, Terrington swung his right at
+once on to the river, and the whole of his little force could be seen
+for the first time as it extended and moved forward across the space of
+open ground to the east of the Palace.  It looked painfully small for
+its job, like an ant attacking a mouse, even though Terrington made it
+as imposing as he could without sacrificing its compactness.  The
+ground, flat as a floor from the river to the foot-hills, gave no
+command for rifle fire over the centre of the town, and Terrington had
+no choice but to march straight at the wall which surrounded the Khan's
+buildings, and chance their being defended.  It was a dangerous piece
+of work, and Afzul Singh never lowered his glasses till the doubtful
+part of it was done.
+
+But Terrington showed at once the temper in which he had undertaken it.
+His cavalry wheeled to the left, leaving the front open, and,
+advancing, formed a screen which covered the skirts of the town.  The
+river protected the other flank, and, with the Guides in the centre as
+reserve, the Sikhs went straight for the eastern gate, while the Dogra
+detachment advanced half right upon the Palace stables where the wall
+ran down to the river.  The guards on the gate allowed themselves to be
+taken, the stables were occupied without resistance, and a command was
+thus obtained of the Palace compound which was seen to be invitingly
+empty.  But Terrington was the last man to be tempted by such an
+invitation.  He had obtained a foothold from which to enforce his
+demands, and did not intend to go a step further.
+
+He could not hope to carry the Palace, filled as it doubtless was with
+the Khan's guards; he had no guns to batter it; but he could now, if
+his hand was forced, make life very uncomfortable for those within its
+walls.  So he began to parley.
+
+What passed was hidden by the Palace wall from the watchers on the
+tower, but after three hours of apprehension they could see that the
+force was preparing to retire, and presently some of the Khan's bearers
+appeared through the gateway carrying charpoys.  Afzul Singh guessed
+what was on them, and his grave consideration made no disguise with
+Mrs. Chantry.  He had no hope that any of those who had been trapped in
+the Palace would return alive, and he held out none to her.
+
+"None come," he said, lowering his glasses; "they are all carried."
+
+Terrington had requested the return of Sir Colvin and his escort, and,
+on the reply that they were killed, had demanded their bodies.
+
+Mir Khan, informed by his spies that the Fort had been loop-holed,
+provisions stored, the trees levelled and every preparation made for a
+prolonged siege, foresaw with a chuckle the very imminent destruction
+of the British force in Sar, and was far too astute to hurry a game
+which was going his own way.
+
+So he tendered the bodies with every mark of respect and the most
+profound apologies for the passions of his subjects which he had been
+unable to keep under control.
+
+Terrington had replied acknowledging the arrival of the charpoys and
+announcing that he was for the present the British representative in
+Sar, and would, on receiving instructions from his Government, acquaint
+the Khan what reparation was demanded for the murder at a friendly
+Durbar of Her Majesty's Commissioner.
+
+The old man, when the message was read to him, rubbed his foot and
+smiled with child-like craftiness.  He admired the daring which had
+flung that handful of the Sirkar's men without an hour's hesitation
+against his Palace; admired it the more since it seemed to prove that
+Terrington was after all but a swine-headed fighter like the rest of
+his kind.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Terrington brought back his men with an undiminished precaution, Mir
+Khan's affability merely increasing his distrust, and Afzul Singh, his
+equal in subtlety and in knowledge of the foe, had prepared a sally
+should the force require assistance in getting out of the Bazaar.  Mir
+Khan, however, to his own everlasting regret, held his hand, so that
+the little expedition returned without a shot fired, and the gates of
+the Fort were shut and barred behind it.  Afzul Singh had been already
+entrusted with the duty of putting every alien out of the Fort, but to
+prevent more securely the escape of information, the guards were
+strengthened, and sentries patrolled the entire front of the Fort with
+orders to shoot any man attempting to enter or leave it before dawn.
+
+When the men were dismissed Terrington called Walcot and Dore into the
+women's durbar hall and sent for Hussain Shah and Afzul Singh, who were
+the two senior native officers.
+
+"I should like to break the news to Mrs. Chantry if I may," said Walcot
+in the doorway.
+
+"The news?" enquired Terrington.
+
+"Of her husband's death," Walcot explained.
+
+Terrington's face showed a certain blankness of apprehension.  He had
+forgotten that there was any one in the Fort, whose hopes or fears
+could be affected by the confirmation obtained of that morning's
+tragedy.
+
+"Oh, certainly," he said.
+
+The room was a long gloomy one on the ground floor, used by Langford
+partly as an office, partly as a store.  Bales and boxes still filled
+two of its corners, and the space in front of them was littered with
+Sir Colvin's and the Chantrys' belongings, which were being removed
+from the Residency with ostentation.  One dark window in the further
+wall lent what dim light the room had, and the table at which
+Terrington seated himself was drawn somewhat towards it.
+
+He was writing when the two native officers entered, and he assigned to
+them the two seats on his right, with the grave silent courtesy with
+which the East had coloured so curiously his English manner.  Dore,
+nervously tired by the excitement of the morning, had dropped limply on
+to a bale of clothing, and lit a cigarette, but the two Sikhs sat erect
+and impassive beside the table.  Clones came in to requisition some
+stores, and reported Langford to be insensible and sinking.
+
+"If you can spare a few moments you might spend them here," said
+Terrington.
+
+The doctor nodded, and sat down on a packing-case beside Dore, rising
+again at once as Mrs. Chantry, followed by Walcot, entered the room.
+
+She was wearing still the frock of creamy lace in which she was to have
+watched the polo that afternoon.  Her face looked listless and white
+and faded above it like a broken flower.  Her eyes sought Terrington's
+in the dim room with a sort of frightened submissiveness.
+
+"May I come in?" she said.
+
+"Of course," he answered, getting out of his chair to hand it to her;
+but Walcot had already drawn forward a seat of Sari rush from the
+relics of the Residency, and she dropped into it limply, with a nod of
+acknowledgment to Terrington, amid all the crushed and huddled
+fragments of her own lost little home.  Walcot sat down on a box beside
+her.  A tiny jade god slid down the pile of rugs and bowls and
+cushions, and lay at her feet with a severed arm.  He had been for
+years the very dearest of her household treasures, and now to find him
+maimed and friendless moved in her a despondent misery which she had
+not felt at her husband's death.  She hid the little broken body in the
+hollow of her hand, and sat there, her head bent over it, shaking with
+sobs.  It was the very smallness of the grief that brought her tears.
+
+Terrington blotted the notes he had written and laid down his pen.  He
+made no sort of preamble: for anything in his manner the occasion might
+have been the most ordinary in the world.
+
+"I wish," he said, "to explain my plans.  Some of us may not come
+through the next few weeks, and I don't want those who do to be saddled
+with my mistakes.  So I'll enter any protest, to cover you in case I'm
+not with you at the finish.  We leave Sar to-night."
+
+Even the two dark impassive faces on his right reflected the
+unexpectedness of his announcement, and Walcot half rose to his feet.
+
+"Abandon the Fort?" he exclaimed.
+
+"Abandon the Fort, and everything we cannot carry, and retire by the
+Palári upon Rashát," said Terrington quietly.
+
+"But I understood, if you'll excuse me," continued Walcot, trying to
+control his excitement, "that all the defences of the Fort which we've
+been at for the last month were your idea."
+
+"They were," said Terrington.
+
+"Have you changed your mind then?" asked the other sharply.
+
+"No," said Terrington slowly, "but I've changed my position.  I've only
+so far had to decide how to make the Fort defensible if it had to be
+defended."
+
+"Yes, but!" Walcot objected, "the clearing of the Residency, the
+blowing down of these trees; all that has taken place since!  What's
+been the object of that if you didn't mean to stay?"
+
+"In war," said Terrington quietly, "it's sometimes as well to keep your
+intentions from the enemy."
+
+"Did Sir Colvin mean us to stay here, sir?" enquired Dore.
+
+"Yes," said Terrington.  "Sir Colvin intended to hold out in Sar if
+anything went wrong till a relieving force could get up here from
+Sampur."
+
+"You absolutely disagree with him, then?" Walcot rapped out.
+
+Terrington looked at him thoughtfully.
+
+"I have another point of view," he said.
+
+"And what's that?" snapped the other.
+
+"He was a political officer and I am a soldier," said Terrington simply.
+
+Dore turned his shoulder upon Walcot, with a wrinkle of annoyance at
+his carping note.
+
+"Don't you think we could hold Sar, sir?" he asked with boyish
+eagerness for a stand-up fight.
+
+"Yes," said Terrington, kindling sympathetically at the thought of the
+fight he too had longed for, "I think we just could, though it might be
+a near thing.  I've decided to clear out," he went on, addressing the
+others, "because the value of being penned up here doesn't impress me
+politically, and because digging us out of this in mid-winter would
+mean a horrible waste of life.  There are only a few hundred of us to
+be wiped out at the worst, but it might take thousands of the men who
+came to save us.  These little sieges are often very costly things."
+
+"I shouldn't think our retirement will be very popular at home," Clones
+suggested.
+
+"I don't suppose it will," said Terrington; "at home they're rather
+fond of a siege; it makes the paper more interesting."
+
+"And how about the intentions of the Government, Colonel," Clones
+continued in his reasonable way; "I suppose you were sent up here to
+carry them out."
+
+"No doubt," said Terrington with his grave smile, "but without being
+told what its intentions were.  Consequently one rather seems to be
+here to make intentions for the Government, and I'm very possibly
+making them all wrong.  But that's their fault for not having sent a
+better man."
+
+"There's one point, Terrington, you don't seem to have considered,"
+Walcot interjected; "that you've got to take a woman over passes which
+even the natives won't cross at this time of year."
+
+"I haven't considered it for a moment," said Terrington shortly.
+
+Walcot's face curdled with anger.
+
+"That's hardly been the habit of Englishmen hitherto out here," he
+exclaimed.
+
+"I dare say not," said Terrington with dry indifference.
+
+Rose Chantry, with her hand still closed about the little broken god in
+her lap, looked up at him through the tears that hung across her eyes.
+Beyond the cool darkness of the entrance door, against the far wall of
+the blazing courtyard she could see the row of charpoys with their
+burden of dead men, mere rolls of sallow dungari cloth, waiting till
+the grave being dug beside the Residency gate should be wide enough to
+hold them.  It was the most dreadful moment of her life, when she
+needed above all to be petted and comforted into a sense of her
+importance, but the man who should have done it was indifferent even to
+her safety.  She had already begun to cheer herself with the thought of
+a siege; the delicacy of her position; the solicitous homage of all the
+men; her cheerful and inspiring effect upon them; the excitement in
+England so intensified by the presence of a woman among the besieged;
+the accounts of her in the papers, made more touching by her loss; and
+then the thrill of the relief--she took the relief for granted--the
+sound of the guns, the fight through the streets of Sar, the cheers of
+the British troops, the ardent congratulations, the soft abandonment of
+that moment at the end of the suspense, and herself the one woman in a
+British army.  And the coming home after such an experience; the woman
+of the moment, every one wanting to meet her; perhaps a command from
+the Queen.
+
+All her dream was shattered by Terrington's implacable decree.  She
+looked at him with despairing hate.  She thought of the reckless
+sacrifices Englishmen had made for women during the Mutiny, and hated
+him the more.  She felt sure that she could never live through the
+snows of those passes about which she had heard such awful stories.
+The cold would kill her; the cold always shrivelled her up; and she had
+nothing to wear, nothing warmer than was wanted for an Indian winter.
+
+And that very morning, only a few hours back, as the party started for
+the Durbar, she had exulted in her triumph over him, she whose folly
+had given everything into his hand!
+
+What ages it seemed since Lewis had swung buoyantly into his saddle,
+and Sir Colvin, ruddy and cheery, had waved her an "au revoir."  Now
+they were rolls of yellow dungari lying out there in the sun.
+
+In her absorption of self-pity she scarcely heard Captain Walcot's
+expressions of dissent from his leader's plans, which were more
+forcible than soldierly.  He was seething with wrath at Terrington's
+treatment of her, and Terrington, aware of his excitement, but quite at
+fault as to its cause, heard him with determined patience.
+
+"And by which pass do you mean to retire?" he exclaimed at last, unable
+to shake Terrington's resolve.
+
+"By the Palári," said the other.
+
+"The Palári!" cried Walcot derisively.  "Why, it's the worst pass on
+this side of the Pamir.  May I ask why you've chosen it?"
+
+"Have you been through the Palári or Darai?" Terrington enquired.
+
+"No."
+
+"Then you can hardly appreciate why I've chosen it," said Terrington
+quietly.  "The Palári is the only one which we've a chance of reaching
+without being cut off; it's the only one not commanded from above at
+this time of year, and Freddy Gale, holding this end of it at Rashát,
+is absolutely done for unless we dig him out."
+
+His reasons were listened to by the room in absorbing silence.  Then
+Walcot blurted out:
+
+"Is this a council of war?"
+
+"No," said Terrington; "it's an opportunity for protest.  I wished to
+put your advice on record, but I didn't propose to take it."
+
+Walcot thereupon declared himself emphatically in favour of remaining
+in Sar; Dore followed him less assertively.  Clones gave a shrug of his
+shoulders.
+
+"It's all one to me where I doctor you," he smiled.
+
+Terrington turned to the two men beside him, who had sat, immovably
+attentive, throughout the discussion.
+
+"We are as the print of thy footsteps," said Afzul Shah, and Hussain
+nodded.
+
+Terrington wrote for some moments, then read aloud his own dispositions
+and the objections which had been urged against retirement.  His own
+plans and reasons were very bluntly outlined, but he gave the case for
+the occupation of Sar with a fulness and cogency that astonished its
+advocates, who did not suspect how dear the scheme had been to his
+ambition, nor what its abandonment had cost him.
+
+He handed the paper to Walcot.
+
+"Will you sign it?" he said.
+
+The best that was in the other man responded instinctively to such
+treatment:
+
+"You've put it a long way stronger than I could myself," he said,
+taking up the pen.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Langford came back to consciousness an hour before he died, and
+Terrington sat beside him to the end, writing instructions to cover
+every detail of the departure while he spoke and listened to the dying
+man.  Langford was a fine horseman and a very capable soldier, and the
+only one of his subordinates on whose decision Terrington could rely.
+He had left in India an uncompleted love affair but he spoke of nothing
+in his last moments but the safety of the force.
+
+"You'll have to watch those Bakót chaps," he murmured, "there's no
+fight in 'em."  And again with more difficulty.  "Those beggars 'll cut
+you off at the Sorágh Gul; get round by the Bewal road.  You'll have to
+smash 'em there."  His mind was evidently away with the retreating
+troops.  His grip tightened on Terrington's hand.  "If only I could go
+along with you, old man.  Oh, it's hard to come to grief at the first
+hurdle."
+
+He shut his eyes with that inconsolable sigh, and it was his
+unconscious soul that whispered, "Give my love to Helen," with the last
+beats of his heart.
+
+Terrington went on writing as Langford's head fell back, then he
+loosened the dead man's fingers from his hand, and left the room.  The
+sheer pressure of thought seemed to have squeezed out of him the power
+of feeling.
+
+In the women's durbar hall he found Walcot and Mrs. Chantry turning
+over the litter of the Residency rooms.
+
+Terrington had left the porterage of the reserve ammunition to Walcot's
+arrangement, and had been expecting his report for half an hour.
+Walcot had, however, considered the packing of Mrs. Chantry's boxes of
+more importance.
+
+The expression of Terrington's opinion on his preference was a good
+deal tempered by Mrs. Chantry's presence; but even so was caustic
+enough to burn itself into Walcot's memory.
+
+As he left the hall without a word, Rose Chantry lifted an Afghan
+poshteen from the heap beside her.
+
+"Did you send me this?" she asked.
+
+It was lined with astrachan, and exquisitely embroidered, and was the
+most valuable of Terrington's few possessions.
+
+"Yes," he said, "it was the only warm thing I could get for you.  You
+will want everything you can wear, and you can put that on over a good
+deal.  There are some boots to come."
+
+She did not know that he had sent her the thing of which he had most
+need himself, and his giving had about it no air of gallantry; but the
+proof that he had thought of her at a moment when he had to think of
+everything touched her far more than had Walcot's voluble commiseration.
+
+She held out her hand to him and tried to speak, but her throat closed
+and her lips trembled.
+
+He took her hand in both of his.
+
+"Poor, poor thing!" he said.
+
+Gholam Muhammed entered with the long lamb-lined boots at that moment
+and laid them with a salaam in front of her.
+
+They had been made for Terrington and were long enough to reach to a
+man's knee, and Rose, whose every breath at the moment compromised with
+a sob, thrust out her pretty foot beside them with unconscious coquetry.
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Terrington, smiling; "they'll go over the
+others.  You'll not find them a bit too big."
+
+He lifted one, with its tassels and showy crimson calf, and, taking her
+wrist as if she had been a child, thrust her hand down through the
+woolly lining which almost filled the top.
+
+The loose sleeve slid back to her elbow against the leather edge, and
+as she looked into his face with a surprised compliance, something in
+the softness of the curling silken warmth against her skin touched her
+suddenly beyond her power of control.  She snatched her arm away from
+him, and, flinging herself upon the heap of curtains and cushions,
+burst into tears.
+
+Terrington, completely at fault, made no attempt to console her.  He
+knew when to leave a man unhindered and to give a horse its head, and
+the instinct helped him with a woman's tears.  He stood watching her
+sobbing shoulders, and the shadows on her golden hair, but his
+thoughts, the instant they were freed from her, flew forward to the
+forcing of the Sorágh Gul, the double-headed defile on the road to
+Rashát, where he knew Mir Khan could intercept him and compel him to
+face an attack from three sides at once.  He tried to compel his memory
+to yield some details of the position which he might turn to account,
+for his own field-sketches only supplied features which would be useful
+to the enemy.
+
+The sinking of Rose Chantry's sobs brought his mind back to the dim
+hall.  He put his hand gently on her shoulder.
+
+"What was it, child?" he said.
+
+She raised her head from the crimson silk, leaning towards him against
+his hand, and mopping her eyes with the ghost of a handkerchief.
+
+"It was the fur," she sobbed; "it felt so soft."
+
+The explanation explained nothing to Terrington--a woman never seemed
+so unreasonable to him as when she gave her reasons--but its
+incomprehensibility absolved him from attempted consolation.
+
+"Well," he smiled, "you mustn't cry again till you're across the
+border.  Hukm hai!"
+
+She looked up at him, leaning still against his hand.
+
+"I'm afraid of your orders," she said shyly.
+
+"Well, there's another," he went on with his paternal air; "you must
+wear everything warm you've got and pack only what you can put on
+later."
+
+"I've nothing warm," she said with half a sob.
+
+"Oh, come!" he rallied her; "then I'll have to send round the men who
+are padding your doolie to pad you too!  How about that shooting suit
+of yours?"
+
+His remembrance of it pleased her far more than her possession.
+
+"It's not very warm," she murmured.
+
+"Well, it's a good deal warmer than these flimsy things," he said,
+lifting the laces that lay round her neck; "and we'll turn a feather
+quilt into a petticoat for you, cut you a boa out of the mess-room
+bearskin, and put the poshteen on top of all.  Mind, you'll have to
+parade in full marching order, or we'll leave you behind for Mir Khan
+to take care of."
+
+An orderly entering with a chit at that moment made an end to the
+boyish talk that was meant to put fresh heart into her, and Terrington,
+after a glance at the scrap of paper, left her at once with a smile and
+a nod and an instant's tightening of his fingers upon her shoulder.
+
+At sunset he read the sentences of the burial service over the trench
+beside the Residency in which the bodies of the three Englishmen were
+laid.  The dusk was spreading under the autumn twilight, while the pale
+spaces of eternal snow beyond Rashát were veiled with rose in the clear
+heaven above the purple ramparts of the valley and the flames of the
+pyres on which the dead Hindus were burned blazed in clear spires of
+light through the increasing gloom.
+
+Rose Chantry stood next to Terrington, in a shooting costume of
+golden-brown tweed, with a leather hunting-belt, a broad band of
+leather about the short skirt, brown leather boots that laced half way
+to the knee, and a brown tam-o'-shanter pinned tight upon her curls.
+She hardly knew what he was reading as she looked across the miles of
+evening to the tinted snows, and heard the crackle of the funeral fires
+on either side of her.  Life had been suddenly changed altogether into
+something hard and glaring and stale and ugly like a ball-room opened
+to the dawn, and she felt to be growing hard and plain and matter of
+fact to match it.
+
+The melancholy volleys were fired above the grave, the level flash of
+orange light splitting the darkness like the sweep of a sword, for
+Terrington, well aware that he was watched, would omit nothing which
+might by its absence suggest a desire for concealment.  While the
+ostentation of the funeral was distracting the attention of Mir Khan's
+spies, all the outward openings in the walls were being closed, so that
+when the funeral party returned to the Fort the arrangements for
+immediate departure could be pushed forward with continued speed and in
+complete concealment.  The twinkle of lanterns everywhere made the
+labyrinth of the old mud walls look as if invaded by a flight of
+fire-flies.  In ordered lines across the courtyard the bearers
+squatted, brown and impassive, beside their burdens; line after line,
+hour after hour, filing forth from the dark doorways of the Fort, till
+half the space between its walls was full.  The other half was covered
+with accoutrements and bristled with piled arms.  In the stables the
+Lancers were removing every needless detail from their equipment, and a
+wisp of rag was twisted round any piece of metal from which a sound
+might be shaken.  In the long gully between the stable and the Fort
+stood strings of mules with a few zabus, snorting and shuffling under
+the loads that were being heaped upon their backs.
+
+An hour after midnight the gate of the courtyard was thrown open, and a
+dark stream of horsemen poured silently out and turned north-east
+towards the river.  They had left their lances broken behind them, but
+took every ounce of food that they could carry and three hundred rounds
+a man.  Hard on the dust of their hoofs followed the Sikhs and Bakót
+levies under Dore; the Sikhs, long and lithe, fine marchers and good
+fighters all of them; the Bakót men short and square, very doubtful
+shooters and untried in fight, but hard hill-men, at home in the snow,
+and equal to almost any labour.  After them came the long lines of
+mules out of the gully snorting and shaking their packs and harness,
+and kicking up more dust than the horsemen.  Rose Chantry's doolie
+followed in rear of these.  It had been padded for her with quilts of
+Armak wool and lined with camel's hair curtains fastened down to keep
+out the wind, and carried a mattress of feathers, a span in depth, to
+save her from the joltings of the road.  Terrington had literally
+sketched its construction with one hand while he wrote a despatch with
+the other, and had himself gone down to the yard to explain away the
+carpenter's difficulties.  But he shook his head at the boxes in which
+Rose had packed what she considered "absolutely necessary."
+
+"No good!" he said.  "Even if we got them to the Palári, we'd have to
+leave them in the snow."
+
+"How many bearers have I?" Rose demanded.
+
+He looked down at her smiling.
+
+"Four for the doolie and a mule for your baggage," he said; "about
+what's allowed for half a company.  And there's a tent for you on the
+mule already."
+
+"I can have some one else's tent," she exclaimed crossly.
+
+"No one else _has_ a tent," he said with the same dry smile.
+
+She turned from him petulantly.
+
+"You can leave them all behind if you like; I don't care!"
+
+Yet she repacked submissively--with the help of the khansamah, whom
+Terrington sent to the assistance of her pride--what she most needed in
+the space allowed her; with a new dull kindling of anger against the
+man who could compel her so easily to obey.  But the eager preparations
+in the darkness subdued her with the sense of an impending fate, the
+silent streaming forth of the little force into the night towards the
+day of battle and the awful snows, and she was gratefully reassured
+when Terrington suddenly appeared beside her as the doolie drew up, and
+helped her in with a comforting pressure of the hand.
+
+"Sleep if you can," he said; "we're perfectly safe for the next twelve
+hours."
+
+His own beloved Guides brought up the rear, and he rode last with them
+out of the Fort.
+
+For the next day and night danger only could threaten from direct
+pursuit, and so his place was for the present with the rear-guard.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+The position in which Terrington found himself requires to be explained.
+
+Determined to clear out of Sar, three ways lay before him.  The valley
+of the Kotli to the south, through the Gate of the Great Evil, by
+which, with Sir Colvin Aire, he had come up from Sampur; the Darai
+Pass, due east across the Kalawari, and then south-east into the
+Punjab; and the Palári, north-east, through the wild welter of ranges
+under the roof of the world and over plains of snow to the western
+border of Cashmir.
+
+The first, though physically far the easiest, was out of the question,
+since the road would be lined with hostile khels who could force him to
+fight every mile of the way, with the odds of the ground and numbers
+always against him.
+
+The Darai, which came next in feasibility, was approached over an open
+and exposed country, and was commanded from above in its most dangerous
+defiles.  Consequently it was by the Palári, the most arduous of all
+the roads between Sar and Hindustan, that Terrington determined to
+retire.
+
+To Rashát, which Gale was holding at the foot of the Palári, there were
+two roads from Sar.  One, the longer, which Terrington had taken, led
+up the left bank of the river through gorges of increasing grandeur
+till the Sorágh Gul was reached.  There the shorter road from Sar
+joined it, and the two rose together to the snows.  Terrington was
+forced to go the longer way because he could cover his retreat along it
+with a small rear-guard, and because the shorter passed through Sar
+itself and beside the very gates of the Palace; but he had to face the
+certainty of finding Mir Khan and his men at Sorágh Gul in a position
+almost impregnable barring his advance upon Rashát.  There, if wedged
+between the force in front of him and that following him from Sar, he
+would be forced to starve or to surrender.
+
+The six hundred men under him were too few to be used offensively; he
+could not squander them against odds in the open.  If compelled to
+fight his way across the Sorágh Gul not many of that six hundred would
+find shelter in Rashát.  By craft alone could he hope to reach the
+Palári with the foe behind him, and the craft that should deceive Mir
+Khan would have to be greatly daring.  Greatly daring it was.  He
+divided his force into three parts.  The first, composed entirely of
+the Guides Cavalry Bengal Lancers, was to push on by forced marches to
+the further side of the double-headed valley which ended in the Sorágh
+Gul.  Being mounted, on a fairly good road and with eight hours' start,
+it could reach this before the enemy, who was mostly on foot, could
+arrive by the shorter road through Bewal.  Sending on a summons to
+Rashát for every man that could be spared, Walcot, who commanded the
+cavalry, had orders to wait the arrival of Mir Khan from Bewal, and
+then, making as much dust as possible, to retire slowly on Rashát,
+fighting as determined a rear-guard action as he could without exposing
+his men, in order to draw Mir Khan after him across the Gul.  It was
+Terrington's hope that the Khan, seeing British troops beyond the Gul,
+would imagine that the entire force had reached it by a superhuman
+effort and, after a perfunctory search of the road towards Sar, would
+follow furiously in order to drive it headlong into Rashát.
+
+To complete the deception, the central portion of Terrington's force,
+consisting of the Sikhs and Bakót levies in charge of the transport,
+were to remain concealed and not to approach the Gul till the Khan's
+intentions became apparent; and the Guides forming the rearguard had
+orders so to delay pursuit along the river road from Sar that the
+pursuers' fire should not reach Mir Khan's ears at the Gul for at least
+twelve hours after he had reached it.
+
+Then if Mir Khan came to the lure, and followed Walcot, the Sikhs were
+to push on at full speed, seize the road where it crossed the Gul, and
+await the rush for safety of the enemy on finding that he was trapped.
+
+It was a scheme of extreme audacity, but in its audacity lay its
+safety.  In splitting up his little force Terrington seemed to be
+offering it for destruction in detail, but the offering was of such
+effrontery that no one, and Mir Khan least of all, was likely to be
+prepared for it.  It afforded, so far as Terrington could see, his only
+chance of a blow decisive enough to cripple for the moment Mir Khan's
+power.  If it failed of that the force was doomed.  Yet, if it should
+fail, what else would have succeeded?
+
+Though Terrington had urged Rose Chantry to rest while she could, the
+morning light was peering between the curtains of the doolie before
+sleep closed her eyes.  She listened all night to the silent march: the
+grunts and whinny of the mules, the jangle of harness, the low-spoken
+orders of unseen men.  And under it all the beat of feet in the dust,
+the quick clatter of driven hoofs, the dull even tramp of armed men.
+
+When she woke it was high noon and her doolie was resting upon the
+ground.  She pulled aside the curtain and looked out upon a land
+unknown to her.  The doolie stood against a clump of tamarisk, but no
+other greenness met her eye in that valley of stones.  The river
+bubbled somewhere beneath her out of sight; and, reaching to the sky,
+on either side of it stood astounding walls of rock, some sheer and
+broken into awful precipices, others vast shelving slopes of shale
+which gave an even more oppressive sense of distance and desolation
+than the cliffs themselves.  A jagged ribbon of blue sky showed between
+them overhead, scarcely wider than the hidden bed of the river, and the
+sun blazed down into that cleft of air like the mouth of a furnace.
+
+The heat fastened with a slap upon her hand as she stretched it out
+into the sunlight, and the whole valley seemed to bend and waver in the
+clear vapour that streamed from every stone.  A little green tent was
+pitched beside the doolie under the tamarisk, but the only other sign
+of a camp came from the span, of mules being driven down to the water,
+and some fifty brown blankets stretched between rifles and pegged down
+with bayonets in the shade of which men were lying in every shape of
+dreamless sleep.  They looked, even to her unpractised eye, terribly
+few in that wilderness of space.
+
+As she crawled out of the doolie she discovered that there was a sentry
+posted over her and the tent, who presented arms, much to her
+embarrassment, as she scrambled up from her knees.
+
+She could see no sign of her ayah, but in the tent she found her
+dressing-things laid out on a folding camp-table; there was a canvas
+basin on a trestle, which was also none of hers, and a canvas bath on
+the floor.
+
+She questioned the sentry in her broken mixture of tongues about the
+ayah, but he could tell her nothing, and evidently had not seen a woman
+about the place.
+
+So, very shyly, and after cautious tying of the tent-flap, testing of
+its skirts, and closing of its little grated window, she began her
+first toilet in camp, pausing, poised, to listen to every strange sound
+without, and especially between every splash of the water in her bath.
+
+She was coiling her hair about her head before the tiny mirror in one
+dense twist, which displayed better than any fashionable device its
+golden thickness, when she heard the slap of the sentry's hand on the
+stock of his rifle, and Terrington's voice outside the tent.
+
+"Hope you slept," it rang out cheerily.  "Gholam is getting us
+something to eat as soon as you're ready."
+
+Rose Chantry's head came through the flap of the tent, with a white arm
+and elbow moulding the last roll of her hair.
+
+"Where's my ayah?" she asked plaintively.
+
+"I wish I knew," said Terrington, handing over his horse to a sais and
+lifting his helmet.  "When we started last night she wasn't to be
+found.  You'll have to put up, I'm afraid, with Gholam's valeting."
+
+He offered her the idea lightly, as though it were all part of a
+picnic; but he had ridden through the night, after the ayah's flight
+had been discovered, tortured by the thought of the woman, sleeping in
+the litter in front of him, young, lovely, widowed and alone among six
+hundred men, without a single other of her sex to shield her from the
+coarseness and defilement of war.
+
+He well knew how men, pressed by the necessities of the field and
+simplified by the daily presence of death, reverted to a savage
+shamelessness, a sweeping aside of convention, not at all to their
+discredit, but of a very fearful grossness to a woman's eyes: and he
+felt, contemplating the future of the next few days, almost as if he
+were the accomplice of some iniquitous abduction.
+
+Rose Chantry noticed--she was learning to notice--that Terrington had
+not been out of the saddle since he left Sar.  A smoke of dust fell
+from the wrinkles of his tunic and breeches as he slid to the ground,
+and there were tiny furrows of dust upon his face.  She noticed
+too--but that needed no learning--how the searching hard-browed look of
+the scout went suddenly out of his eyes as they fell upon her, and the
+lines about his lips relaxed.  He had ridden forward to the hanging
+bridge where alone the river could be crossed below the Gul, as Walcot
+had sent back word that it would require strengthening to carry the
+transport, and he was of necessity his own engineer.  So he had missed
+the sleep and meal of which his men had partaken, and had some reason
+to look way-worn when he appeared before Rose Chantry's tent after
+thirty hours of unceasing strain.
+
+Yet when he reappeared, washed and shaven, fifteen minutes later, he
+seemed as alert as though he had but just left his bed.  Responsibility
+always endued him with double strength.
+
+Gholam Muhammed could discover nothing better than a broken
+biscuit-case to set the breakfast on, so Rose brought out the camp
+table from her tent and improvised a tablecloth from a Russian towel.
+
+Terrington, returning to find her seated in the shade of the tamarisk
+making tea, looking, thanks to the close coils about her head, more
+astoundingly young than ever, blithe and fresh as an English morning,
+caught his breath with a sharper sense of her isolation.
+
+He seated himself on the biscuit-case at the further side of the table,
+and his glance travelled from her up the forbidding precipices, and
+back again to her trim figure.
+
+"Well!" she enquired provokingly; "you're wishing me a thousand miles
+away?"
+
+"I am," he nodded.
+
+"You're not half grateful for your mercies," she retorted; "it ought to
+be rather a change to have a woman to pour out tea for you before a
+battle!"
+
+"Oh, it is a change," he smiled.
+
+She handed him a mug of blue and white enamel.
+
+"And is there going to be a battle?"
+
+"Not to-day," he said.
+
+"To-morrow?"
+
+"Probably."
+
+"And shall we all be killed?"
+
+"It's not impossible," he said gravely.
+
+She leant her lips down to her own brimming mug and looked across at
+him over its edge.
+
+"Don't you wish you were safe back in Sar?" she said.
+
+He shook his head as she lifted and drained the mug and set it down
+with a sigh of content.
+
+"I _was_ so thirsty.  Isn't it grilling?  Why did you make me wear
+these clothes?  I can't see much sign of the snows.  Isn't this tinned
+milk horrid?  What's become of all the men?  You don't seem to have
+kept many to look after me!  Will you have an egg?"
+
+"Please," said Terrington to her last question.
+
+"Was that your bath and basin I had this morning?" she went on.
+
+"It was," he said.
+
+"I don't see why I should be clean at your cost," she demurred.
+
+"Oh, you're not," he assured her; "you're the only one in the force
+with time to be clean at all, and even you won't want to wash after
+to-morrow."
+
+"We shall all be killed, shan't we?" she asked mischievously.
+
+"Whether or not," he said drily; "we shall be too cold to have much use
+for water."
+
+"I can't imagine such a condition just now," she answered.
+
+"You'll be able to when you've crossed the Palári," said Terrington
+quietly.
+
+She twisted her chair sideways, put one hand above the other across the
+back of it, and leant her chin upon them both.  She watched Terrington
+so for a few seconds while he finished his egg.  Then she asked:
+
+"What have you done with Captain Walcot?"
+
+"He's commanding the advance-guard."
+
+"Miles and miles away?"
+
+"I hope so by now," he said.
+
+"Is _he_ going to fight to-day?"
+
+"No."
+
+"To-morrow?  When we all do?"
+
+"Mir Khan permitting," said Terrington with a smile.
+
+"Will it be more dangerous where he is than where we shall be?"
+
+"No," said Terrington; "rather safer.  He'll have a line of retreat."
+
+"Safer!" she echoed with astonishment; "then why didn't you send me
+with him?"
+
+Terrington looked at her thoughtfully as he inverted the tin of milk
+above his mug.
+
+"Pure selfishness," he said.  "I wanted some one to pour out tea for me
+before the battles."
+
+"I don't see why you shouldn't speak the truth," she pouted.
+
+"I don't see why you should want it spoken if you know it so well," he
+said.
+
+"You were afraid to send me with him!" she thrust out sharply.
+
+"Was I?" he said, cutting off the drip of the milk with his spoon.
+
+"Yes!  You were afraid he'd spend his time with me instead of looking
+after his men."
+
+Terrington pushed the kedgeri towards her persuasively, but she shook
+her head.
+
+"Do you know that Captain Walcot is in love with me?" she went on.
+
+"How should I?" he said, helping himself to the dish she had declined.
+
+She gave a little hopeless sigh at his obtuseness and a complacent tilt
+of the head.
+
+"He's been in love with me ever since he came to Sar," she asserted.
+
+"Has he?" said Terrington, puzzled by the confidence.
+
+"Yes," she nodded.  "You think that very wrong, I suppose?"
+
+"Well," he admitted mildly, "do you think it very right yourself."
+
+She straightened her shoulders, lifting her chin, and her grip
+tightened on the back of the chair.
+
+"It's not a question of what I do or don't think right," she said with
+sudden fierceness; "it's a question of what a woman's got to be and to
+put up with out here if she's tolerably good looking.  You think we're
+just silly fools, who laugh and chatter and let men make love to us.
+You don't know that it's just to keep things pleasant, and prevent rows
+for one's husband in little places like Sar, where every one's jumbled
+together, that one does laugh, and chatter, and pretend not to see
+things, and seem to like things that one hates.  You suppose, because
+we don't make a fuss, that we're frivolous and empty-headed, and don't
+think for a moment what a time you'd have of it if we went in for being
+anything else."
+
+"No," said Terrington doubtfully; "I don't suppose we do."
+
+He was perplexed by her revelation, never imagining that it came of a
+desire for his good opinion, and resenting her careless sacrifice of
+another man's secret.  He knew nothing about women, nor how little they
+counted a loss of honour from the sacrifice of anything in what could
+be considered an excusing cause.
+
+So that he was quite unprepared when, with her elbow propped upon the
+chair, and turning her back upon his vague admission, she said in a
+voice uncontrollably unsteady.
+
+"Oh, I know what you think of me!"
+
+Terrington, who neither knew what he thought of her nor what she
+thought he thought of her, held his tongue, and Rose, with her back
+still towards him, and after a sniff at the opposite hills, continued
+less precariously:
+
+"Do you think it's impossible for a woman to change?"
+
+"Oh, surely," he protested, smiling; "that's never been urged against
+her."
+
+"You might be serious when you know I am," she said with such a grieved
+reproach that Terrington repented his levity.  "Mayn't a woman learn
+something sometimes from things that happen, even though she was once a
+fool?"
+
+"Yes, I'm sure she may," he assented heartily; "and much quicker than a
+man."
+
+She turned about towards him gratefully.
+
+"Yes," she sighed, "but you'll never believe that I shall be good for
+anything, after what I did in Sar?"
+
+"Oh, shan't I!" he said cheerily.  He finished his tea, and smiled at
+her with a new friendliness across the table.  "Look here," he said,
+"I'm going to turn in, and I want you to wake me in an hour's time.
+Will you?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"But you want more than an hour."
+
+"Yes," he said, "but I'm not going to get it."  He looked at his wrist.
+"That'll be on the stroke of three.  You've got a watch?"
+
+She held hers to her ear.
+
+"It's stopped," she said.
+
+He unfastened his from his wrist and handed it to her.
+
+"Wouldn't you like a sleep yourself," he suggested.
+
+"Oh, no!" she said.
+
+He threw himself down in the shade of the tamarisk, and, leaning on his
+elbow, glanced at her for a moment doubtfully.
+
+"It's only to be an hour," he reminded her; "not what you think I want."
+
+"You're going to be called at three," she said precisely.
+
+He smiled at her little air of responsibility as he laid his head down
+upon his arm, and she, seeing that he had nothing on which to rest it,
+got up quickly and fetched him a pillow from her doolie.
+
+"Why didn't you ask me for it," she said reproachfully.
+
+He took it from her with another smile.
+
+"I'm so unused to the luxury of being looked after by a lady."
+
+But he gave her hand a clasp which meant a good deal more to it than
+gratitude.
+
+Rose Chantry sat almost motionless during the hour which followed, in
+that happy sort of preoccupation which is outside of time.  She had
+strapped on Terrington's watch, to feel the loose shackle of it about
+her thin wrist, and looked now and again at its face with startled
+consciousness, unaware if minutes or hours had gone by since her last
+inspection.
+
+The valley lay oppressively silent in the fierce heat.  The mirage had
+eaten up its northern end, and the close-set precipices had melted into
+an open space of air, which showed, with the strangest effect of
+disappearance, nothing beyond.
+
+Thin blue threads of smoke stretched up to heaven from the forsaken
+camp fires, and the mules which had come back from watering floundered
+in the dust; but nothing else seemed to move between those walls of
+stone except the ceaseless waver of the heated air.
+
+Terrington slept without stirring; his lips set as firmly as when he
+was awake, his lids closed like a mask in bronze, as if rather with
+determination than from drowsiness.
+
+Rose could not help comparing the strong guarded look of his sleeping
+face with the flaccid abandonment of Lewis Chantry's, who always
+slumbered with his mouth open and his eyelids half apart.
+
+At three she leant over and put her finger upon his arm, and his eyes
+opened quiet and wide awake as though she had touched the spring of his
+consciousness.
+
+He rose at once, whistled for his horse, was in the saddle three
+minutes later, and riding, a solitary figure, up the gray road of the
+stony valley towards the bridge.
+
+Rose Chantry watched till the undulating outlines of both horse and
+rider were dissolved in the distorting glare, with a feeling in her
+heart which no man before had ever brought there.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+An hour later Terrington returned, and the march recommenced.  The
+bridge had been strengthened, but even so it looked perilous enough,
+and Rose, after seeing one of the mules lurch over and burst to a pulp
+on the rocks beneath, preferred to walk across with a rope about her
+than to be carried in the doolie.
+
+Afterwards she fell asleep and was only wakened when Terrington drew
+aside the curtain and told her that it was time for dinner.  The doolie
+was on the ground again, but the night was black about it and a cold
+air seemed to be pouring down out of the sky.
+
+Rose shivered as she pushed the curtains aside and stepped out into the
+darkness.  Spaces of pitchy gloom on either side of her, and a
+sparkling riband of stars overhead showed the force to be still in the
+defile, but something ghostlike and pale seemed to come between the
+stony blackness and the stars.  It was the light of the snows.
+
+A few yards beyond the doolie a fire flickered, over which Gholam was
+leaning, peering into a pot; and further off some score of camp-fires
+pierced the darkness with clear pointed cones of flame.
+
+As she came into the circle of the firelight Terrington appeared beside
+her, the poshteen in his hand.
+
+"Sleep well?" he asked as he helped her arms into it, and turning her
+round towards him by the collar, buttoned the frogs across her chest as
+though she were a child.
+
+"It fits you proper!" he proclaimed, surveying her at arm's length.
+
+She smiled at his motherly vigilance, but felt with keen happiness its
+protective care.  He made her feel so completely in his charge that,
+had he given her a kiss as he buttoned her coat, it would have seemed
+no more than she had been accustomed to from others who had dressed her.
+
+He drew a stool for her to the fire, recounted the humorous mischances
+of the journey while she had been asleep, and jested over the
+ingredients in the stew which Gholam was making them.
+
+The frank fraternity in his manner increased her sense of a girlhood
+which had come back to her.  She sat listening to his talk with the
+smiling happy-serious air of youth.  And they ate together of the stew
+with great relish despite the suggestions he proposed to find in its
+bones.  And when they had finished the modest little dinner, Terrington
+spread a rug beside the fire, and they sat close to the red verge of
+it, for comfort of the warmth; Rose, resting on her wrist, with her
+feet tucked under her, girlishly erect, and with the big collar of the
+poshteen turned up about her ears, but Terrington, at greater ease,
+leaning upon his elbow with his body bent towards the flames.
+
+Rose, however, did not have him altogether to herself.  The approach of
+action was signalled by a succession of orderlies, for whom brief notes
+had to be written, and Hussain Shah arrived later for a consultation.
+
+Still, despite its interruptions the time seemed to her the most
+delightful she had ever spent.  She was tasting for the first time what
+it meant to feel.
+
+The blazing fire pushed the night back from a brief circle about them,
+and, when the flame fell, the darkness seemed to leap forward like a
+black thing with wings trying to spring from behind upon their
+shoulders.
+
+In the darkness was the unknown morrow, and death, and the blood and
+horror of battle; and in the firelight just the man and herself; the
+man who was showing her a new unknown kind of manliness, and herself
+with all her married days and ways forgot, listening like a girl to her
+first discovery in heroes.
+
+"Time to turn in," said Terrington, as he came back out of the darkness
+on parting from Hussain.  "We start at two; and no one can say when we
+sleep again, so do all you know.  I'll see if your doolie is ready."
+
+She turned out one little hand to the flame with a shiver.
+
+"Oh, I can't leave the fire," she said.  "Mayn't I sleep here?"
+
+He looked at her with the air of considering her request as a
+reasonable proposition.
+
+"I don't see why you shouldn't," he said; "I'll fetch your blankets."
+
+He fetched the mattress as well, and the boots he had given her, which
+he happened to find inside the doolie.
+
+"You must wear these," he said, "if you sleep out."
+
+She took them from him with a sigh of submission, sat down upon the
+mattress and prepared to pull them on.
+
+"Don't put your hand into them," he said warningly.
+
+She opened her eyes in question.
+
+"It may make you cry," he smiled.
+
+She repaid his memory with a glance of pleased surprise, and shook her
+head softly.
+
+"Not now!" she said.
+
+She held up the boot towards him, and thrust her arm down into its
+depths.
+
+"So warm," she purred.
+
+She covered her shyness in pulling them on before him with the pretence
+that they were much too tight.
+
+Terrington smiled at her efforts.
+
+"I'm afraid you'll grow out of them very soon," he said.
+
+Then he tucked her in under the blankets and wrapping himself in his
+cloak lay down beside her.  She risked the comfort in which he had
+arranged her to stretch out a small white hand to him to say
+good-night; and he held it long enough to express to her the subtle
+newness and nearness in their common knowledge that such a night might
+mean.
+
+Rose seemed only to have just ceased to watch the changing colour of
+the flame on Terrington's face when a hand was laid on her shoulder and
+his voice spoke in her ear.  She jumped up, dreaming of battles, so
+stiff that she would have fallen but for the arm which he put under
+hers.  The doolie suddenly appeared out of the darkness, he helped her
+in, bade her good-bye with a clasp of the hand, dropped a sharp order
+to the sentry who strode beside her, and was gone.  The bearers moved
+off at a quick amble, and when they halted she knew she was amongst
+men.  The night was still of an impenetrable black and she could see
+nothing between her curtains, but she heard in the silence the shuffle
+of feet, and the grunted "Huh!" of the Bakót men as they fell in half
+awake and hitched up their accoutrements.
+
+Then with a whisper the jampanis moved on, and to the swinging to and
+fro of the doolie she fell asleep.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+Rose woke to a sense of excitement which pierced her sleep.
+
+"Tell him they're right down here in front of us," she heard Dore's
+voice in a hard whisper.  "And take that doolie back," he added angrily.
+
+The doolie spun round, but before it was gone a hundred yards Rose
+stopped the bearers.
+
+The morning was gray, cold, and very still, just after dawn.  A white
+wet mist had come down upon the hills, and hung from cliff to cliff
+like a ceiling cloth across the valley.  Ahead, laid out behind
+boulders of blue grey stone, she could see the yellowish attenuated
+line of Dore's Sikhs spread like a fan on either side of the road.
+
+A runner, naked but for his loin-cloth, and throwing up the dust from
+the soles of his feet, went by towards the front, coming back somewhat
+less hurriedly ten minutes later.
+
+There was no further sound nor sign of life for half an hour, and then
+Terrington with an orderly came in view round the bend of the road
+riding slowly.  He stopped with a smile of wonder where Rose was
+sitting on a stone before her doolie at the side of the road.
+
+"However did you get here?" he asked.
+
+"Mr. Dore sent me back," she pouted.
+
+"Sent you _back_!" he echoed.  "I should think he did."
+
+She came up to his horse's shoulder, and with a "Good morning," offered
+him her hand.
+
+"Is it going to be a fight?" she asked as he took it.
+
+"It is," he answered, "and you're in front of the firing line.  You
+must wait here till I return to you."
+
+She stood back demurely with her hands behind her, and he rode on with
+some injunction to her sentry which she did not understand.
+
+He was met, she saw, by Dore near the line of skirmishers, and in
+obedience to some command the section on either side of the road turned
+outwards and began to creep up the steep sides of the valley, taking
+cover, when they halted, so effectively that not a man was to be seen.
+
+Just as the last of them had disappeared a rifle rang out, faintly, far
+ahead.
+
+Rose, who had not taken her eyes from Terrington, stiffened at the
+sound, and stood tensely listening with an ear towards it.
+
+She had to wait a full five minutes till the shot was repeated, but
+hard upon that followed the soft rattle of a fusillade.  Though it
+sounded vague and dull as the patter of rain on water, she knew it at
+once for what it was, and started forward eagerly towards it along the
+road.
+
+The sentry, mindful of Terrington's injunction, tried to stop her, but
+she ordered him to stand aside with such imperious authority that he
+gave way, and Rose went on towards the spot where Terrington was posted
+above the road with his glasses raised.  He was so absorbed in the
+scene they gave him that he did not hear Mrs. Chantry's approach, and
+was only aware of her presence beside him when he turned to search for
+the Sikhs upon the hill.
+
+He lowered his glasses sharply and faced her with a frown.
+
+"I told you to wait for me," he said reprovingly.
+
+"I know," she murmured, "but I couldn't.  I'm no good at waiting."
+Then, as this information brought no softening to his eyes, she added
+defiantly: "I don't see why you should treat me as a child.  I don't
+intend to be kept out of danger."
+
+"There's no danger here to keep you out of," said Terrington, "except
+the danger of your being seen."  His eyes took in her troubled face and
+his manner changed suddenly to a reasoning gentleness.  "You see the
+fight's right away over there, beyond the Gul.  Mir Khan's pushing
+Walcot back on Rashát, and we hope he thinks he's got us all.  We're
+hiding here, in case he sends any one to look for us along the road to
+Sar, and the game would be up if he spotted us."
+
+He helped her up on to a stone which gave her a view over the low ridge
+in front of them, and handed her his glasses.  Then, as she did not
+know how to use them, he turned her round to him, and fitted them to
+her eyes, and standing behind her with his hands over her shoulders,
+shifted the lens till they suited her sight.
+
+The mists had lifted, and she could see without assistance the entrance
+to the double-headed valley where the gorge which brought the road from
+Bewal joined that from Sar.  Beyond their junction was the famous Gul,
+showing as a dark cleft across the valley, and, again beyond that the
+hills closed in about a defile more forbidding than that through which
+they had come.
+
+Here and there across the throat of it, like tufts of bog cotton, burst
+little white puffs of smoke, where Walcot's men were holding back Mir
+Khan's reconnaissance.  The force they covered was so well concealed
+that even the glass revealed no sign of it, but the Khan's advance
+could be traced in specks and streaks of whitish yellow climbing out of
+the Gul, which Walcot had made but a feint of defending, and creeping
+dispersedly towards the puffs of smoke.
+
+Down the valley towards Bewal the Khan's main body could be made out.
+Dark masses of men divided by varying spaces and mingling in the
+distance with driven flocks and herds.  The dull morning glimmer of
+steel wavered over it like the light upon a spider's web.
+
+Near the centre was a body of horsemen tailing out along the road,
+which made a gay tendril of colour even at that leaden hour, it was the
+Khan's bodyguard in purple and fawn and gold.
+
+As Rose Chantry moved the glasses from end to end of the enemy's
+column, her certainty of a safe return to India collapsed utterly.
+
+She looked round at Terrington, expecting to see the same despair on
+his face that had seized upon her heart, but he was watching Mir Khan's
+advance with an unaltered countenance.
+
+"Oh, Captain Terrington!" she cried hopelessly, "there are thousands of
+them: they'll eat us up."
+
+He put a hand under each of her elbows and lifted her down from the
+stone.
+
+"Well!" he said smiling, "we're going to play the dickens with their
+digestion."
+
+They walked down to the road where Dore was standing with Terrington's
+mare.
+
+"You need send back word of nothing," said Terrington, "we overlook
+your position.  Keep your men where they are, no matter what force may
+pass you, and don't fire a shot till you get the signal."
+
+This laying of a line of fire across the neck of the defile had been
+Terrington's last piece of daring, to cover the chance of Mir Khan's
+detaching a force to search the Sar road strong enough to pen the
+British troops in the defile and prevent their issuing to fall upon the
+flank of the men engaging Walcot beyond the Gul.
+
+Terrington realized the possibility of such a move on seeing the size
+of the force which the Khan had so unexpectedly collected, and added at
+once this risk the more to the many he was taking in order to make the
+enemy's defeat sufficiently disastrous to deter him for a few hours
+from pursuit.
+
+He nodded a farewell to Dore, lifted Rose into the saddle, and walked
+back beside her.
+
+She leant forward to pat the mare's neck and get a side view of his
+face.
+
+"Are you awfully excited?" she asked shyly.
+
+His thoughtful eyes came round to her.
+
+"Awfully!" he said, smiling.
+
+He signed to the doolie to follow them, and led the way back along the
+road, which rose slowly for about a mile.  There was nowhere any sign
+of life, and the fight and the scene behind them seemed suddenly to
+have passed out of being.
+
+They went a little way in silence, and then Rose Chantry said gravely:
+
+"Captain Terrington, do you _really_ think we shall beat them?"
+
+He put a hand on the saddle behind her.
+
+"Are you afraid, child?" he asked.
+
+She nodded pensively.
+
+"I can't help it," she broke out with a sort of petulance; "I do so
+love being alive: and I've had so little of it; only just the last few
+years."
+
+He looked up into her face, with its gay air of beauty softened and
+sobered by the thought of death.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I understand."
+
+She searched his expression doubtfully.
+
+"Only for _me_?" she questioned.
+
+"Oh, _I'm_ not a lovely woman," he smiled.
+
+"Who told you that _I_ was?" she asked him.
+
+"Ah!  I've found it out for myself," he sighed.
+
+"Have you?" she said without conviction.  "And aren't _you_ afraid to
+die?"
+
+"A man has to be afraid of other things more," he told her quietly.
+
+A sharp turn of the road brought them suddenly into the Dogra's camp.
+Though no fires were burning the men were round their cooking-pots
+finishing a meal; food and sleep in Terrington's conception going half
+way always towards winning a fight.
+
+He lifted Rose out of the saddle, asked her if she were equal to a
+climb, and together they clambered up the ridge of shale on the north
+of the valley at the head of which Hussain Shah had his post of
+observation.
+
+The track was steep and the stones slippery, so that for most of the
+way Rose's hand was in his, and when they came to a spot where the
+shale slope was half afloat in water he stooped, with the remark that
+he must carry her, and lifted her on his arm; setting her feet down, an
+instant later, upon a rock, in order to seat her for greater ease upon
+his shoulder.
+
+She sat erect, with one hand under his chin, rejoicing in the air of
+mastery that never thought to ask her leave, and in his strength which
+was more severely tried than she suspected by the shifting stone and
+slush.
+
+Hussain's post overlooked the ridge where Dore was lying, and commanded
+a view of the valley towards Bewal; but the eastern trend of the road
+hid Walcot's doings beyond the Gul.
+
+Hussain at once began an elaborate explanation in Pukhtu, Terrington
+nodding his head and following the indications of the other's hands,
+but Rose could not tell by any outward sign how the recital affected
+him.  He turned to her when it ended, and told her they were going
+higher for a wider view.  She pleaded to go with him, but he merely
+shook his head, smiling at the chaos of rocks above them, over which a
+goat only could go in safety.
+
+Rose sat herself down in a corner of the sangar opposite the three
+signallers, and watched Terrington and Hussain haul themselves up the
+scarp, taking cover as warily as though they were stalking sambur, yet
+never hesitating nor halting for an instant, the Risaldar a length in
+front, and Terrington swinging hand and foot after him in absolute
+accord.
+
+They disappeared behind a buttress, and Rose fell to watching the
+signallers, two bronzed and splendid sepoys and a havildar of the
+Guides, whose blue and white flag slapped ceaselessly in the air.
+
+Far away upon a spur above the road by which they had come she could
+make out the flutter of an answering signal, and, while she tried to
+follow it, suddenly a star of light winked like a sunlit window on the
+hill-side far down the defile.
+
+It stirred the little group like the fall of a shell.  The havildar
+thrust his paper and pencil on the unoccupied sepoy, hoisted the
+heliograph over his shoulder, and scrambled out of the sangar with his
+head turning as he went for a glimpse of the unexpected sun.  He had
+his tripod settled, and an answering shaft of light was flying from his
+mirror down the valley before the flag had ceased its flapping behind
+him, but not before the nearer station had also found the sunlight and
+set a second star in the gray sameness of the hills.  The flag fell,
+the click of the mirror took up the speech of its shaken folds, and
+dazzling lances of sunlight flung from ten miles away began tilting
+with the lashes of Rose Chantry's eyes.  She was so absorbed by the
+strangeness of their silent language, that she was startled to find
+that Terrington had dropped alone and unnoticed from the rocks above
+her, and was scribbling a message which he handed as he finished it to
+the havildar.
+
+He stood watching intently the answering flashes, twice prompting the
+reader when he was at fault.  Rose, conscious of a certain still
+determination which had come into his manner, went over and stood
+beside him.
+
+"Has anything happened?" she asked, as the answer to his order sparkled
+in the air.
+
+He wrote a second message before replying; then he put his hand in her
+arm and walked her back to the sangar.
+
+"Yes," he said; "Mir Khan is proving himself to be a good soldier.
+He's going to take no risks."
+
+"Are you taking any?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, yes!" he smiled; "I'm taking them all.  That's the worst of being
+the weaker side."
+
+He stopped, and looked out again over the Bewal valley, where the
+enemy's forces could be seen dividing in the form of a Y, one arm
+leading towards the Sorágh Gul and the other towards the entrance of
+the Sar defile, where Dore was lying.
+
+"He's coming this way?" she suggested.
+
+"Yes," he assented, "he's coming this way--half of him.  He's either
+found out our little game, or he's going to make sure we're not playing
+it.  So we've got to fight him here."
+
+"Is that worse for us?" she enquired anxiously.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"And who's over there?" she asked, with a tilt of her head towards the
+distant hills.
+
+"Subadar Afzul Singh and the Guides," he said; "but thanks to Mir Khan,
+they can move up now, which is a point to us.  And now we must go down
+to lunch."
+
+It was all so evidently the playing of a game to him, though the stakes
+were life and death, that she was infected for the moment by his
+incentive to the forgetfulness of her own fears, and asked eagerly of
+Afzul's march as they went down the hill together.
+
+Terrington expected the Guides in three hours, and though he had no
+fear of being unable to hold out until they joined him, it was a
+question if he could delay his counter attack so long without rendering
+Dore's position too precarious.  Everything would depend on the pace at
+which the enemy advanced and the force employed for his first attack.
+
+When they came again to the water, Terrington knelt down without a
+word, and Rose seated herself with a laugh upon his shoulder.
+
+But he did not set her down when the wet space was crossed, but carried
+her on to the little green tent which Gholam had pitched above the
+road, laughing to her protests that it was one of the disadvantages of
+being so light that people would insist on carrying her.
+
+The signal which had dropped from the ridge had set all the camp in
+motion.
+
+Men were building sangars; boxes of ammunition were being unloaded from
+mules and carried up the hill; all signs of a camp had disappeared and
+the transport was slowly toiling back by the way it had come.
+
+Rose declared herself to be too excited to eat, but Terrington insisted
+on her finishing what he thought sufficient, and set her an example in
+appetite in spite of numerous interruptions.
+
+No one could say, he reminded her, where nor of what their next meal
+might be.
+
+Then he found her a place from which she could see, as she insisted,
+the progress of the fight in the greatest safety, posted her doolie
+with its bearers behind, and left the faithful Gholam in charge of her.
+
+"I mayn't see you again," he said, taking her hand, "but word will be
+sent to him, and you must do as he tells you, as we may have to make a
+dash to get over to the Gul."
+
+"And if we're beaten will we go back?" she asked.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"If we're beaten we shall die here," he said quietly.
+
+She held out her other hand to him.
+
+"I'm not afraid now," she said under her breath.
+
+An hour of anxious waiting followed, then the enemy's scouts began to
+appear on the road in the gap of the ridge that Dore was holding.
+
+As the ridge offered them no advantages and the searching of it
+entailed exposure, they kept to the lower ground and came on slowly on
+either side of the road.  An advance-guard followed, and then a body of
+horsemen, the valley growing slowly brown with them.
+
+They halted with evident suspicion of Terrington's tactics, but came on
+again, reassured by the safety of the scouts, who were within a few
+yards of the lower sangars, before, following the signal stammer of the
+Maxim from the road, fire opened from the whole line at once upon the
+packed mass in the valley.
+
+The result should have been disastrous to the attackers had the
+shooting been even fairly accurate, which unfortunately it was not.
+The Dogras included a very small proportion of marksmen, and the Bakót
+men had not outlived their remembrance of the matchlock, and probably
+fired over the heads of everything.  Some score of the scouts were
+turned over, and a few men and horses fell in the main body, chiefly to
+the Maxim.  The remainder scampered for cover in all directions,
+followed by an independent fusillade which did very little harm.  At
+the sound of the firing, reinforcements began to pour through the gap
+above which the Sikhs lay, silent but excited spectators, and in a very
+short time the attack was more cautiously renewed.
+
+The high ground which Terrington was holding on either wing converged
+forward from his centre, so that the Saris in trying to force the road
+found themselves exposed to a crescent of fire, and after a vain
+attempt to rush the Maxim, fell back, and by creeping up the sides of
+the valley began a movement to outflank him from above.
+
+For this they only needed time to be successful, as the defenders' line
+was already stretched beyond the limits of safety, and Terrington
+watched with varying anxiety the progress of this movement, the
+gathering mass of the enemy on the road beneath him, and the slow
+closing up of the Guides in his rear.
+
+He gained some time by a sortie from either flank, cutting off the men
+who were climbing above him, but this only forced them to make a wider
+circuit and postponed their eventual success.  He returned from this
+sally, a smoking carbine in his hand, his face smeared with heat and
+dust, and a bullet-hole through his helmet, to find Rose standing in
+the sangar which he had quitted, watching him with proud admiration.
+
+The enemy's centre was following the sortie back with every rifle that
+could bear upon it, and bullets were striking in front of the sangar
+and flying over it like brazen winged bees.  Two or three men had been
+hit, and Terrington stooped to lift one of them into safety before he
+could speak to Rose.
+
+"Go back!" he said almost angrily.  "What are you doing here?"
+
+"I shan't!" she returned defiantly.  "I'm going to be with you."
+
+Terrington turned to direct the carrying of the wounded down to the
+road: then he put his hand upon her shoulder and said quietly.
+
+"Go back, please, for my sake, to the doolie, we're all going forward
+in a few minutes."
+
+Gholam, who had been standing beside her, with an expression, turned
+towards Terrington, of absolute impotence, gave a little jump and
+clapped his hand to his elbow.
+
+"Are you hit?" said Terrington.
+
+The man withdrew his hand, looked at it, all smeared with blood, and
+salaamed.
+
+"The Sahib's servant has the honour," he replied gravely.
+
+Terrington placed himself more completely between Rose and the enemy's
+fire.
+
+"Take him down, dear, will you, and tie him up?" he said.
+
+The little endearing word moved her more than the command.
+
+"Come!" she said, as though it were rather the servant than herself
+that was responsible for the trouble, and walked straight down to the
+doolie.
+
+The enemy had made another dash on the centre after the sortie, and as
+it was driven back the signal was given Dore for which he had so
+eagerly been waiting, Terrington's hand having been forced by the
+increasing number of the enemy in front of him, the Guides being still
+a long way to the rear.
+
+A bugle call replied to the signal, and Dore's men opened fire
+instantly on the crowded road beneath them.
+
+The Saris turned at the sound, to find themselves penned between two
+lines of fire and the precipices of the defile.
+
+It was little wonder that panic seized them; the long deferred
+disclosure of the trap adding to their apprehensions.  Those nearest
+Dore's ridge dashed for the gap without an attempt at resistance, and
+those in front, seeing their supports in flight, fell back, firing
+wildly in both directions.
+
+The Bakót men finding the foe in retreat began to shoot with more
+effect, but Terrington, trusting rather to their knives for slaughter
+and feeling that the decisive moment was come, signalled to the Guides,
+still three miles away, to press forward, and ordered a general advance.
+
+The Dogras, being on the lower ground, were the first to get within
+thrusting distance, and closed on a terrified huddle of men swinging
+this way and that in frenzied efforts to escape like a frightened flock
+of sheep, and crying out for mercy from the bayonets that pierced them
+from behind.  The mercy meted out to them was the mercy of the
+Durbar--a swift end, and the scorn of born fighters in their ears; and,
+as the Bakót levies descended with their crooked knives upon the
+scurrying flanks, the Saris flung away their arms and fought with each
+other to escape the avengers.
+
+Terrington stopped the pursuit with the utmost difficulty as it came
+under the fire which Dore was pouring upon the fugitives, and sent
+volley after volley with deadly effect into the maddened wedge of men
+penned in the gap.  It was absolute butchery, and the struggling men
+fell to the bullets in sheaves across the road, the life blown out of
+them at three hundred paces.
+
+The Sikhs continued to fire despite Terrington's attempt to stop them
+so long as any of the flying mob remained beneath them, and then,
+scampering over to the other side of the ridge, opened on the runaways
+as they emerged from the defile.
+
+Terrington pushed the Dogras forward into the gap as soon as the
+bullets of the Sikhs had ceased to search it, and discovered at once,
+in spite of his advantage, the greatness of the task in front of him.
+
+Mir Khan, realizing from the sound of battle in the defile the trick
+which had been played him, was throwing forward every man he could
+spare to shut Terrington within it till he could extricate the force
+which Walcot had skilfully drawn after him up the road to Rashát.
+
+Terrington gathered at a glance that the disorder which the flight of
+the panic-stricken Saris was creating in the ranks of the
+reinforcements offered him the one chance of getting his transport out
+of the defile and of holding a fighting position on the ground beyond
+it.
+
+So, though the Guides were not yet in sight, and his force utterly
+inadequate to the task before it, he pressed on upon the heels of the
+fugitives which were blinding the enemy's front, in order to give
+Dore's men on the south of the road an opening to descend from the
+ridge and crumple the broken flank back upon the centre.  So soon as he
+saw that the Sikhs were in motion he pushed the Dogras forward in the
+centre to maintain touch with them, and cover the egress of his
+transport from the defile, taking the Bakót men along himself to
+prevent an enveloping movement on the other flank.  This, the extreme
+right, was the weak point in his advance, since he had not sufficient
+men for an extension to gain the support of the hill-side, and the
+enemy's line was long enough to overlap him, and, by passing round his
+right, to force him off the road and close the entrance to the defile
+behind him while the Guides were still within it.  This was the
+critical hour of the day, for Mir Khan, who had hurried back from the
+Gul to direct the attack, at once realized his advantage, and leaving
+his right to take care of itself, swung all his horsemen round to the
+other wing, and sent them dismounted clambering over the further slopes
+of the valley, while he himself advanced against Terrington in front.
+Sending word to the half of Dore's force, which still lined the ridge
+on the north of the gap, to get still higher up the hill and threaten
+in turn to outflank the enemy's flankers, Terrington set himself to
+hold the half-trained Bakót levies in a position which would have tried
+the morale of the best disciplined troops.
+
+In this, without the special help of Heaven, he certainly would not
+have succeeded, since in order to keep his men together he had to
+expose himself in a fashion that should have brought death to him
+twenty times in the day.
+
+Rose Chantry who, with the rest of the transport, had been hurried
+through the gap and left to find what cover they could in the open
+ground beyond it, watched him through her glasses, standing erect
+amongst the men who were crawling and slithering at his feet, with a
+growing wonderment of appreciation for the manner of man he was.  She
+saw him pounce upon one skulker who was trying to slink away, lift him
+like a dog by the neck to his full length, march him forward in the
+face of the bullets, and fling him down again in the firing line.
+
+The charmed life which he seemed to wear had its effect at last upon
+the superstitions of the men he was leading, and a fatalist spirit took
+the place of their fears.  This improved their pluck if it did not mend
+their shooting; yet Terrington was compelled none the less to retire
+them, leaving his dead and badly wounded behind him, as the enemy's
+flankers had worked round far enough to enfilade him.  He was thus
+compelled to fall back slowly for the better part of a mile, until his
+supports became entangled with the head of the transport column.  This
+caused the officer in charge of the transport to attempt an immediate
+withdrawal, forgetting that the ground over which they had reached
+their present cover was now swept by the bullets which were passing
+over Terrington's head.  The first two mules to emerge from the shelter
+of the rocks fell dead with their driver, and the significance of the
+little spirts of dust that barred the way was brought home to those
+that followed.  The head of the column halted, the rest of it continued
+to advance, the mules becoming jammed into a huddled mass.  Rose
+Chantry's bearers had picked her up when the retirement was ordered,
+and when it ceased and the crowding beasts began to accumulate round
+the doolie she put her head through the curtains and asked Gholam what
+had happened.  He explained apologetically that the leaders of the
+transport were smitten with great fear.
+
+"Go on," she shouted to her bearers, "and show them the way."
+
+Gholam interpreted the order and the jampanis had shuffled timorously
+along for a few paces, when the enemy's flankers came in view of the
+disordered transport and with cries of triumph began to shoot down into
+it from the hill.
+
+One of the jampanis was hit in the first fusillade, and, another
+dropping with fright, the doolie came with a crash to the ground, and
+Rose scrambled out of it, her teeth set and a little revolver in her
+hand, to face what would probably have proved the closing scene of the
+day's fight, had not, at that moment, the leading company of the Guides
+emerged from the defile.
+
+They had come for three miles at the double and had no breath for
+shouting, but they extended with parade precision, and went straight
+for the scattered sharpshooters on the enemy's left.
+
+But the day was too old for half measures.  With a faith in
+reinforcements and a strong front, Terrington signalled Afzul Singh,
+who had, despite his forty-five years, outpaced on foot the youngest of
+his men, to keep his right shoulder up, thus ignoring the enemy's left
+and bringing the Guides through the broken Bakót men on the main road.
+Then, as the panting line came up to him, Terrington put himself in
+front of it and charged straight at Mir Khan's centre.
+
+That part of the enemy's front, unaware, owing to the slope of the
+ground, of the Guides' arrival, only waited a snap of the trigger, as
+the wave of buff-clad men burst over the rise.  Then it turned and ran.
+
+Blown though his men were, Terrington carried them half a mile further
+before halting them.  By doing so he cut in halves Mir Khan's line of
+battle and isolated his entire left wing, which did not need a second
+volley from the Guides to explain what had happened, and in an instant
+was leaping like a flock of goats over the shale slopes in wild retreat.
+
+Leaving Afzul with half a company to complete the rout, Terrington
+wheeled the other half to the left, and, coming into line with the
+Dogras and Sikhs, fell upon the enemy's right, which had seen the
+defeat of the centre, and pressed it hotly down the hill.
+
+He only carried the pressure far enough to clear the road, and, as soon
+as the second company of the Guides appeared in the gap to form his
+rear-guard a general movement began across the valley towards the
+Sorágh Gul; the Sikhs, Dogras and half a company of the Guides covering
+the transport on the south side, the second company of the Guides,
+breathless but athirst for battle, holding the road behind it, and the
+Bakót men still running like hounds over the great shale slopes on the
+north hacking down the flying Saris with their knives or shooting them
+like rabbits at a dozen yards.
+
+It was a triumph of unhoped-for victory, but even yet was not complete.
+For the swiftness of Terrington's advance brought him to the Gul before
+the men who had been pursuing Walcot could recross it after the news of
+Mir Khan's defeat had reached their ears.  The Gul was a ravine with
+sides almost precipitous and close upon two hundred feet in depth, with
+a torrent raging over its rocks which could only be forded at one place.
+
+Walcot, reinforced by Freddy Gale with the garrison of Rashát had
+turned upon his pursuers, who reached in their flight one side of the
+Gul as Terrington's force appeared on the other.
+
+Panic-stricken they plunged into its abyss to escape the bullets behind
+them, hoping to hide amongst the boulders in the torrent's bed.
+
+But the river had risen behind them, and a foaming floor of water
+stretched from side to side of the chasm.
+
+Clinging like conies to those bare declivities they were shot screaming
+for mercy or insane with fear, and fell like blood-gutted leeches into
+the flood beneath.
+
+Terrington watched the slaughter, silent and stern, feeling to be but
+the avenging instrument of God, yet wishing for the qualities of a god
+to reconcile him to its pitilessness and inevitable injustice.
+
+While he watched, his ear caught the click of little feet on the rocks,
+and he turned to find Rose Chantry beside him, gazing down upon the
+torment of that gulf of death.
+
+"Go back!" he said hurriedly.  "You mustn't see this."
+
+She turned to him a little face fierce and white and ablaze with
+vengeance.
+
+"I _shall_ see it," she cried imperiously; "they killed my husband."
+
+Yet her vengeance came rather from the relief of long pent anxiety, and
+it was less of her husband that she was thinking than of the man who
+had come back to her out of mortal danger, his coat ripped by bullets
+in two places and a dark scum of dried blood across his face from a
+flesh-wound in the temple.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+After a brief halt for a meal, Terrington sent on the Dogras to convoy
+the wounded to Rashát, the Bakót levies following at midnight with the
+transport.  He would rely only on his tried fighters for the long
+rearguard action which would begin on the morrow, and only end beyond
+the Paldri.
+
+But though the struggle of the next few days would mean hardship for
+all and death to many, the worst was over with that day's ordeal, on
+which had hung the safety of the entire force.  Had Terrington been
+beaten, every man with him would have been massacred, Rashát would have
+fallen within a month, and his name held up to the scorn of the years
+to come as of one who had lacked the courage to stand to his post.  Yet
+his victory had been, under Heaven, but an accident.  He knew that well
+enough.  That fight, the most sanguine for its size in Indian history,
+which has coloured the name as it dyed the water of Rashát river, would
+have been lost but for the arrival at its crisis of men on whose coming
+he had no right to count.  It was won indeed, won in its overwhelming
+effectiveness by his subtlety, his daring tactics, his personal valour,
+but it would have been lost despite all those, despite any devices that
+men could have contrived, had not a certain company of the Guides
+possessed the splendid training and the undauntable energy of the men
+whom Afzul Singh had led.
+
+Yet now he had, thanks to them, the redounding credit of it, who, but
+for them, would have borne its enduring shame.
+
+Determined to hold the Gul on the morrow as long as possible,
+Terrington halted the Guides on the further side of it, and ordered
+them to turn in as soon as they had made a meal, while the Sikhs
+prepared defences and furnished pickets for the night.  The Guides,
+save for their three miles' scurry, had been under fire all the way
+from Sar, and had not left a man behind them.  Keen soldiers all of
+them, they forgot their own part in the day's success, and, when
+Terrington went down to inspect their camp, gathered from their
+cooking-pots and cheered him tempestuously.
+
+Terrington laid his hand affectionately on Afzul's shoulder.
+
+"You did it," he said gratefully; "you did it!"
+
+The circle about his own camp fire was completed by Walcot and Freddy
+Gale, and it was there that Rose Chantry watched the ways of men who
+have come out of battle.  Walcot, who had fought well and been slightly
+wounded in the shoulder, seemed unable to talk enough.  Speech gurgled
+out of him like rain from a gargoyle.  Freddy Gale listened, throwing
+in brief descriptive touches, his round merry face convulsed from time
+to time with infectious laughter.  Terrington, who sat beside her, said
+nothing at all, but the keenness of his eyes was softened by a grave
+content.
+
+Rose noticed the warmth of his greeting to Gale and his evident
+gladness to have a man under him on whose knowledge and judgment he
+could depend.  Once, when leaning forward across the fire after dinner
+to ask Walcot a question, she put her hand unawares on Terrington's,
+which was lying on the ground.  He did not move, and she took it in so
+tight a grip, that, as she settled herself again, he turned his head
+and looked smiling into her eyes.
+
+The enemy had been so roughly handled that Mir Khan could not persuade
+his men on the morrow to a fresh attack across such an obstacle as the
+Gul, and Terrington after holding it till nightfall fell back upon
+Rashát.
+
+But before he reached it the Saris were again upon his heels like a
+pack of famished wolves, ravenous for blood.  During the three days'
+march to the foot of the Palári, the fighting never ceased night or
+day.  In the dark it dwindled to the buzz or the slap of the sniper's
+bullet, varied by an attempt to rush a picket; doing only occasional
+damage but keeping the whole camp awake, and causing a suppression of
+the fires whose warmth was becoming with every hour more essential.
+
+Dawn generally brought an attack on two or three points at once, and
+persistent efforts were made during the day to outclimb the British
+flanking parties and command the line of march.
+
+Once, when these were successful, Terrington only obtained relief by an
+attack upon the centre, threatening the safety of the men above the
+valley, but the effort proved so expensive that he was obliged in the
+future still further to extend his wings and retire by continuous
+echelon up and down the slope of the hills.  It was slow work.
+
+Then, too, though his losses were not heavy, the carriage of the
+wounded was an increasing labour, and he was finally obliged to
+dismount the Lancers and use their beasts for his injured men.
+
+The first fringe of the snow was hailed, for all its augury of
+hardship, with a shout of welcome.
+
+As the men's feet slipped in its yielding softness, their eyes followed
+the vast white slope that stretched above them till it was lost in the
+grayness of the sullen sky.  There, close under the heavens, tormented
+by winds that powdered the snowflakes into icy points and whirled them
+to and fro in furious eddies, lay the road to safety.
+
+There was death in its blinding whiteness, death in its numbing torpor
+death in its piercing cold; but beyond was life and wife and honour and
+reward.
+
+The sight of the snow drove Mir Khan to more desperate means, for,
+without some critical success, beyond the Palári he dared not go, since
+his opponents might be able to count on reinforcement, and the pass
+close behind him.
+
+But to Terrington the pressure of the enemy now became less serious
+than the difficulties of the road.  His men soon learnt the value of
+snow as a protection, and snow entrenchments were much more rapidly
+constructed than stone sangars.  But with every march the strength of
+his coolies was declining, and they could scarcely carry their reduced
+loads.  The horses, barely able to keep their footing on the frozen
+ground, became at once exhausted when the deep snow was reached, and
+had to be killed and eaten.  This brought him almost to the end of his
+fuel, and left the wounded to be carried by effectives who were already
+beginning to feel the strain of constant fighting and the toil of
+forcing their way through a foot's depth of snow.  Moreover every hour
+of ascent brought them into an air perceptibly rarer, and increased
+grievously the stress of every added effort.
+
+On the second day they reached the terrible region of the winds, and
+for three hours waited helpless in a blast of icy crystals that cut the
+face till it bled, and froze the eyelids with the tears that it brought
+to them, and made every breath a pain.
+
+The storm struck without warning.  The snow ahead seemed suddenly to
+rise on end; the next instant the awful gray mist of ice was tearing
+past them.  For those three hours it was impossible to move or to see.
+The air seemed as thick as a river jellied with snow, and even when the
+eyes could be opened, the clotted whiteness hid the end of one's arm.
+Where the men clung together in frightened and shivering groups, the
+wind piled drifts on the lee side up to their necks.
+
+It seemed as though the snows of all the mountains was being swept into
+the sea, and yet scarcely a flake fell upon the rear-guard, fighting
+some few hundred feet below.
+
+Terrington was alone when it fell, riding along the column, persuading,
+encouraging, helping, threatening; lifting, by sheer strength of will,
+the tired trail of men higher and higher.  He slid off his shaggy
+barebacked little pony, turned its tail to the wind, and leant against
+it for the warmth which he knew both soon would need.  He had an
+immense capacity for patience, but it failed him now; and its failure
+taught him what otherwise he might have waited long to learn.  For
+through those long bitter hours it was not of his men that he
+thought--his men who had been his only care and love for years--but of
+Rose Chantry.  Thought of her, crouching frightened in her doolie,
+fallen somewhere in the snow, the warmth going surely hour by hour from
+her frail shivering little body, the cold fingers of death slowly
+closing upon her, and no one by to bring her comfort and help her to be
+brave.  The thought was agony to him, and by the agony he knew that it
+was love.  Light, vain, fickle, ignorant, there were reasons enough,
+and he knew them, for not even liking her.  He did not know, for that
+matter, if he did like her.  He longed with indescribable solicitude to
+see her face again.  That was all he knew.
+
+Even the cold that crept numbingly through him could not stifle that
+desire.  If the storm lasted for six hours no living thing would be
+left in the pass.  He was not afraid of that.  He feared to outlive it
+and find her dead.
+
+Yet when the storm ceased as suddenly as it began, he made no search
+for her.  He was still that much master of himself.  Finding a floor of
+rock swept bare by the wind, he diverted the line of march across it,
+and there, with Clones, inspected all the men as they passed for
+frost-bite; and soon had a row of them laid out under blankets and
+vigorously rubbed with snow.
+
+The wounded had suffered most; all the worst cases were dead, many were
+past help, and none had escaped injury: after them came the baggage
+carriers, ill-clad and ill-nourished as they were, nearly all of whom
+had paid for the exposure with a frozen foot or finger.
+
+It was right at the end of the transport that Rose's doolie appeared,
+and to Terrington's immense relief she thrust out her head from the
+curtains as the bearers halted.  It was a face fearfully pinched and
+cold, but there was a new spirit behind it, for she would not speak of
+her own ailings, but insisted upon getting out to rub the hands of the
+frozen, till Clones, seeing she was likely to faint from fatigue, put
+her back in the doolie.
+
+On that night they camped below the Palári, and the next day it was
+crossed by the entire force.
+
+But though the wind spared them, that day was the most trying of the
+retreat.
+
+The blazing sun upon the snow after the storm had produced a rapid
+increase of snow blindness.  Of the English officers Terrington alone
+was unaffected, the others all having to be led, Walcot especially
+being much disfigured and in great pain.
+
+The blinded men went hand in hand in single file with a leader who
+could still see the track to each squad of ten, the skin of their faces
+blistered and bleeding, their eyes crimson and inflamed, and tears
+trickling continuously from them, to freeze upon their cheeks.
+
+At a height of twelve thousand feet each movement was a struggle, and,
+from ceaseless fighting, marching and want of sleep, every nerve and
+muscle were at the breaking point.  Gale, blind and worn out, but
+cheery as ever, facing a fight which he could not see, kept the
+rear-guard in splendid shape, and Clones, though blind also and
+suffering from frost-bite, continued to feel his way among the wounded.
+
+The faith of all was pinned desperately upon Terrington, and keen the
+anxiety about his sight.  It was perhaps sheer determination which kept
+him as impervious to the glare as to fatigue.
+
+Tired out he was, and knew he was, but he seemed able to hold his
+tiredness at arm's length for so long as he was needed.
+
+By evening the last man was clear of the pass; the enemy had not dared
+to cross it, so the British force was practically safe from pursuit,
+and on the morrow would be dropping down towards the green valleys and
+the south.  But only a few of the hardier hill-men had energy to kindle
+smoking fires of the wet brushwood they were able to collect.
+
+Terrington had gone round the camps to say a cheering word to the men
+and see if all that was possible for the frozen and wounded had been
+done; and at last, his task ended, turned with foreboding to the green
+tent, which Gholam had pitched warily in a crevice of the rocks.
+
+In the supreme effort of that crowning day he had not seen Rose since
+the night before, when she had seemed achingly weak and ill.
+
+She was sitting on the mattress, all her rugs piled about her,
+shivering.  She burst into tears as he knelt down beside her.
+
+"My feet are frozen," she sobbed, "my feet are frozen."
+
+He had her boots off in an instant, and set the lantern on the ground,
+searching anxiously for the fatal whitening of the flesh.  But though
+her feet were absolutely numb the frost-bite had but just begun, and
+half an hour's vigorous rubbing took the whiteness out of them; and
+then Terrington chafed them gently, and breathed on them, and wrapped
+them under his coat to bring the blood back to them as imperceptibly as
+possible while Rose sat with hands clenched and face working, smiling
+at his tenderness and crying with pain.
+
+But in that torture of recovery she reached her limit of endurance.
+The cold had sunk into her soul, and when Gholam brought in the smoky
+lukewarm mess, which was all that even his adroitness could contrive in
+that white waste she turned her head away from it, saying wearily that
+she did not want to eat.
+
+Terrington, with a sense of difficulty beside which the leading of men
+was a simple matter, sat down on the mattress beside her and put his
+arm supportingly about her shoulders.
+
+"I'm going to feed you," he said.
+
+She tried to meet his mothering with a smile, but as the flap of the
+tent lifted with a blast of wind, which flung a spray of snow over
+them, she shivered and shrank back, shaking her head.
+
+"It doesn't matter if I eat or not," she said despairingly.  "I can't
+live another night with the cold.  I wished I could die all last night,
+it was such dreadful pain.  I can't stand it any more."
+
+For answer he drew her a little closer to him.
+
+"God's brought us to the end of our trouble, child," he said.
+"To-morrow it will be all going down, down, down, and warmer and warmer
+every hour.  You've only to make a fight of it just this one night
+more--for my sake," he added.
+
+She shook her head despondently, but he thrust his fork into the dish,
+and brought a morsel of meat to her mouth, and made her eat it.  And
+so, coaxing and commanding, he forced a meal upon her, eating one
+himself to give her time, and she leant against him with her head upon
+his shoulder, faintly happy, but shivering at every blast that pierced
+the chinks of the tent.
+
+He rose when she had finished and laid her down on the mattress,
+wrapping her up in everything he could find.
+
+"You're not going away?" she murmured apprehensively.
+
+"Only to have another look at the men," he said, tucking the rugs
+closer about her.
+
+"You'll come back; promise you'll come back," she pleaded anxiously.
+
+Kneeling down beside her, he bent down and kissed her forehead gently.
+
+"The moment I can," he said.
+
+He tightened the flaps of the tent, and set Gholam Muhammed to pile
+snow about the skirts of it.  Then he went on to the camp.
+
+He found everything there very much in need of him.  The plans he had
+made had not been completed.  The men, utterly worn out, had flung
+themselves down too tired even to care for self-preservation.
+
+Walcot was seriously ill; Gale, Dore, Clones, and the two senior native
+officers were all blind, and so were ignorant of what had been left
+undone.
+
+Freddy Gale, though he had twice fallen from exhaustion, had directed
+personally the issue of rations, and used every chance to cheer his
+men; but he missed that sense of their condition, and they the sense of
+his control, which can come from sight alone.
+
+They lay in the snow, inert, benumbed, certain victims to that frozen
+sleep from which there is no wakening.  Only the old soldiers of the
+Guides had stretched their blankets, and made any likeness to a bivouac.
+
+Terrington's voice came upon the scene like the call of a bugle.  There
+was help in it and scorn and energy and command, and, behind if,
+unconquerable will and eyes that saw.  The men dragged themselves to
+their feet, and straightened themselves to match its clear direction.
+Order after order rang out, like the voice of a ship's captain
+shortening sail, quick, certain, vivid with necessity, but cool as the
+dew.  The heaps of men became ranks that took shape and moved.  Rifles
+rose on end, blankets were slung between them, and slowly the crescent
+camp came into being, which should offer least resistance to and most
+shelter from a storm.  The little hospital leanto was enlarged, the
+worst cases were brought in and treated, and then laid for warmth one
+upon the other at the end of it.
+
+For close on three hours Terrington's labour never ceased for a second,
+and the camp lived upon his voice.  He did not leave it till he had
+seen every man with some covering over him, and some food to eat; not,
+indeed, till maternally, he had tucked them all into bed.  Then, hoarse
+with shouting and drunk with fatigue, he staggered back to the little
+green tent.
+
+Rose turned her head as he entered, but the eyes were strange to him.
+He kneeled down beside her, dried the snow from his hand, and laid the
+back of it upon her cheek.  Her skin was gray and mortally cold.
+
+"I'm dying," she whispered.
+
+He felt her hands, which were blue and lifeless, and with no flutter of
+a pulse.  The air in the little tent was a long way below the
+freezing-point, and it was quite evident that she was slowly sinking
+into the torpor from which she never could be roused.
+
+He chafed her hands, but no heat came to them; she merely turned from
+him with a weary gesture to be left alone.  Then he pressed her palms
+against the talc of the lantern, but the flickering candle seemed to
+give out no warmth.  Then, suddenly, a thought struck him with the
+fierce hazard of despair.
+
+He gazed at her in doubt for a moment, then he got up, dusted the
+flakes of snow from his riding-breeches and drew off his long boots.
+
+Rose turned her head away from him on the pillow with a sigh and closed
+her eyes.  She was slipping happily away from him into the land of
+shadows.
+
+Terrington took off his greatcoat and spread it over her.  Then he
+lifted the wraps that covered her, and lying down upon the mattress
+slowly drew them over himself as well.  She turned again, childishly
+fretful at being disturbed.  Running a finger down the buttons of his
+patrol, Terrington raised himself, and taking her in his arms drew her
+under him, spreading his body upon hers.
+
+Though he was heated with exertion, it was a long time before any
+warmth could melt its way into her chilled flesh.  Terrington pressed
+his face against hers, first to one cold cheek and then to another,
+breathing, as one thaws a window pane, upon her neck.  At last, when he
+had almost lost hope of saving her, she made a little nestling motion
+towards him like a frozen bird before the fire.  Then her breath began
+to be audible, and she gave long sighs as though to free herself of his
+weight upon her.
+
+Terrington's limbs were numb with the intentness of their pressure, and
+his arms, folded about her, had fallen asleep.  The cold seemed to lie
+like a wet sheet over his back.
+
+Presently Rose moved beneath him, a movement of her whole body: her
+eyes opened, met his without wonder, and closed again with a sigh of
+content.  Her arms straightened, and then, loosening limply from the
+shoulders, slipped to her sides.  She seemed to soften and grow supple
+beneath him and her breath came evenly between her lips.  She was
+asleep.
+
+Terrington raised himself slightly, and so stayed all the night.
+
+The agonies that he suffered from cold, cramp, and the stubborn
+struggle with fatigue passed what he had thought possible to human
+endurance.
+
+In the gray of the morning she opened her eyes again.
+
+"Nevile!" she exclaimed, as though she had but just parted with him in
+a dream.
+
+She had pushed in wonderment her hands against him, and he fell over as
+though his arms had been cut off.  She stared an instant at his
+grotesque efforts to move, then with a sudden passion of enlightenment
+seized his useless arms.
+
+"Nevile, Nevile!" she cried, "what have you done for me?  You've saved
+my life."
+
+He smiled dimly, trying to lift himself upon his elbows, but dropped
+back again.
+
+"Have I?" he said.
+
+Her left arm went like a snake about his shoulder, and her face came
+down quick and close to his.
+
+"Why did you do it?" she asked almost angrily.
+
+"I love you, dear," he said.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+After the night under that gable in the roof of the world, many things
+happened; but there ended the siege of Sar.  For Sar is, in the old
+tongue of Maristan, the word that stood alike for the kingdom's centre,
+the heart's core, and this was a siege unprepared and unintended, by a
+girl of a man's heart.  For it was to the girl that he surrendered.
+
+The rest of the retreat, the cold neglect with which the Government of
+India tried to treat the little force, the angry expostulation of the
+Press of England, and the tardy honours, are they not written in the
+book of the Rulers of India, and in the heart of a people that does not
+forget?
+
+But with his crossing of the Palári, Terrington's achievement ceases.
+The rest was mere marching.  Thanks, indeed, to his diplomacy it was
+mere marching, and that not a sword was drawn against him on the road
+home.  But he thought little of such success; he had a natural
+capacity, he said, for creating false impressions.
+
+He came very near incapacity during the first day of the descent: for
+his vigil of the night before had cost him the use of both his arms and
+legs.  Rose prayed him to be carried in her doolie, but he knew the
+effect the breakdown of his seemingly unassailable strength would have
+upon his men, and had himself tied upon the back of his little pony,
+and led, with no slackening for his infirmities, wherever his
+encouragement or his counsel was required.
+
+The perpetual jogging down-hill was, in his condition, not a bad
+imitation of martyrdom, which, in his heart he bore as deserved for
+having spent his strength upon a woman instead of for his men.
+
+But the power came back to his arms by the way, perhaps from sheer
+pain; and the use he found for them at the end of the day, when, though
+still in the snow, the weary little band gathered warm and happy about
+fires of fir, certainly suggested no regrets to the woman they enfolded.
+
+
+
+
+Her Reputation
+
+
+
+I
+
+The man who was sitting at the writing-table had not raised his head
+for half an hour from between his hands.
+
+When at last he lifted his face, after a third knock upon the door, the
+prints of his fingers were branded across its grayness in livid streaks.
+
+The hall-boy who entered, after waiting vainly for permission, handed
+him a telegram, which he opened and spread out on the desk before him.
+
+He stared at it blankly, with his temples upon his wrists, until the
+boy, tired of waiting, asked if there were any answer.
+
+Terence turned and looked at him as though unable to account for his
+presence.
+
+The boy repeated his question, and Terence shook his head, resting it
+again upon his hands as the door closed upon the messenger, gazing down
+uncomprehendingly upon the thin pink sheet.
+
+Presently, however, the meaning of what lay before him filtered into
+his consciousness.  It was an invitation of no moment, but it needed a
+reply.  He drew out a sheaf of forms from a pigeon-hole, wrote a
+refusal, rang for the boy, and sent it off.
+
+The incident passed at once from his mind, but it had disturbed his
+absorption.
+
+He rose and paced slowly and aimlessly about the room, gazing blindly
+out of the window and at the engravings upon the walls.  There was
+something curious in the combined looseness and stiffness of his
+movements: he seemed literally to be dragging himself about.
+
+When he sat down again he turned his chair slightly from the table, and
+leaning back in it, stared out at the gray day with a look of dazed
+pain upon his face.
+
+So he remained while an hour went over; as still, as empty, as a
+deserted house.
+
+Then, with a deeper breath and the same confused slowness in his
+movements, he drew an envelope from his pocket, and spread out the
+sheet within it upon the desk.  The lines it carried covered but a
+single page, and he had read them through a dozen times.
+
+They came from a woman whom he had loved more than his own soul, and
+they cast him, with freezing contempt, out of her sight for ever.
+
+He read the bitter words again, hoping their sharp edge would make a
+wound of self-respect in the consciousness they had benumbed.  But he
+tried in vain to hurt his pride, or by any fresh vexation to escape
+from the torment of his thoughts.
+
+Earth is jealous of its anodynes, even of pain that brings oblivion or
+of death that means release.  He refolded the letter and returned it to
+his pocket, knowing that in half an hour he would be reading it again.
+
+Meanwhile a new impulse moved him.
+
+Leaning forward, he slid back a secret door in the top of his desk, and
+took from the space behind it a bundle of letters.  They were in
+envelopes of almost every hue and shape, but all were directed by the
+same hand, in a vain weak sprawling character.
+
+Terence drew the packet towards him, and set his fingers on the string.
+
+Then with a shudder he pushed it from him, and thrust his face into his
+hands.
+
+Under those harlequin covers were hidden the one chance of happiness
+for his life, and the reputation of a woman.
+
+He could make them yield which of the two he chose; but the other must
+be destroyed.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+It was nearly two years since he had first seen his name written in
+that hand, a very short while after he had made acquaintance with the
+writer.
+
+She had stirred his curiosity from the moment he met her; partly by
+something tragic in her beauty, which was indubitable; partly by some
+quality which he found repellent even in her attraction.  She bore a
+well known name, but her husband's estates were encumbered; every place
+he had was let, and they entertained but little.  Terence had known the
+latter slightly for some years, and disliked him extremely.  He was a
+man with a predilection for any sport in which something suffered,
+provided it could be followed in comfort; and he openly lamented having
+married for love--as he termed it--instead of putting up his peerage to
+the bidding of the States.
+
+Terence had pitied any one who might have to do with him, and was thus
+already at a sympathetic angle on meeting his wife.
+
+She surprised him by her detachment from the world in which she lived.
+She viewed it with vague eyes, knowing of its happenings only from what
+was told her, and divining neither their probability nor their
+consequence.
+
+Nothing, dropped into her mind, seemed to fructify: it lay there like
+seed upon a rock.  To Terence, whose chief resource was his ignorance,
+such detachment appeared incredible.
+
+He thought her beauty of itself would have proved a sufficient link
+with life, or with at least the deadlier forms of it which wear the
+name in London.  A woman with her eyes was generally enabled to foresee
+some of the surprises in the Book of Judgment.  Men looked to that.
+
+But it was clear to Terence that she foresaw nothing.  If corruption
+had approached her, it had failed to get not a hearing only, but a
+seeing.  Whatever place there might be for it in her heart, there was
+plainly none in her intelligence: she did not even know it by sight.
+
+Terence guessed that from the men she knew, and by the way she knew
+them.  She had evidently no instructive sense of a bad lot.  A bad
+woman had that, and often added hatred to it; a good woman had it, and
+added pity.  She had it not at all.
+
+He found consequently no compliment in the gracious way she had
+received him, and no seduction in the enquiring sadness of her eyes.
+Since the meeting was at Ascot, and she was exquisitely dressed, he
+tried all the frivolous topics he thought might interest her; then some
+of the serious ones which interested him.  She seemed about equally
+bored with either, and he was surprised when she asked on parting, with
+a curious gravity of request, if he would come and see her.
+
+He saw her twice in town.  She had named her day, but he had forgotten
+it and gone on another.  So she wrote, finding his card, to arrange a
+meeting, and, after it, offered him another afternoon.  Terence was on
+each occasion her only visitor, and surmised that he was not so by
+chance.
+
+Yet he found it difficult to account for the privilege.
+
+They seemed to have little in common, not even the tongue in which they
+talked.  Both appeared to be translating their thoughts before speaking
+them.
+
+Terence felt stupidly ineffective, and wondered in what straits of
+tedium she might be living on receiving, a day or two later, an
+invitation to spend a week end at Wallingford, where her husband had
+taken a summer house.
+
+He hesitated; (to be desired despite such a show of dulness seemed
+almost pathetic); accepted, hoping that work would intervene; but in
+the end, went.
+
+He told himself that it would be outdoor weather, a house party, and he
+should see little of his hostess.
+
+It was outdoor weather; but the party had been arranged for pairing,
+and he saw little but his hostess.
+
+They spent the days upon the dozing river, and sat together late into
+the warm nights upon the lawn.
+
+He knew nothing about women, and did not understand their ways.
+Therefore he was gravely interested in the account she set before him
+of her groping soul.
+
+He had never imagined any conception of existence so out of touch with
+reality as were her beliefs.  Her idealism would have discredited a
+schoolgirl's fiction, and she clung to it as though there were some
+merit in being deceived.
+
+Such determination to remain in the dark almost angered him.
+
+"But men and women aren't like that," he expostulated more than once.
+
+"That's what people are always telling me," she replied pathetically:
+"but why aren't they?"
+
+He hadn't, as he assured her, the remotest notion; his interest lying,
+not in what men weren't, but in what they were.
+
+He tried to impart that interest in her, but without success.
+
+If men were the brutes they seemed proud to be, she asserted
+vigorously, she didn't care how ill she knew them.
+
+But it was clear that she had higher hopes of humanity than she
+confessed, and it would have been clear to any one but Terence that
+those hopes were becoming centred on himself.
+
+What men said of him had roused her incredulous admiration, and he
+seemed to dislike women as much as he respected them.  His honesty, his
+deference, and his grave good looks attracted her from the first; his
+sympathy and discernment riveted the attraction.  He reproved her
+optimism in vain; for was he not its embodiment?
+
+Terence, unconscious of being anything but a somewhat poor companion,
+discussed the sentiments she suggested, growing ever more astounded by
+her severance from realities, and more touched by her unhappy days.
+
+Of her husband's life he knew more than she had surmised, but she had
+surmised enough to make wifehood an indignity.  His unfaithfulness, as
+a stye by which she had to live, soured for her every odour in the
+world.  She had not the vigour to ignore it, nor the courage to escape.
+She had dreamed of marriage as a royal feast; she woke to find herself
+among the swine.
+
+The discovery would have hardened some women into defiance; some would
+have sheltered with it their own intrigues; but the shock cowed in her
+all further curiosity in existence.  If life were really like the bit
+she had tasted, she preferred to starve.  The other men she met seemed
+as horrible as her husband; they had the same speech, the same jests,
+the same dissipations.
+
+She shrank more and more into herself; even women revolted her by their
+tolerance of men's presumptions.
+
+Then Terence came.  Like a plant grown in darkness, her anaemic
+delicacy of thought responded with an unhealthy exuberance to the first
+ray of sunlight.  She listened to his silences and found them
+refreshing; then she drew him into speech.
+
+He spoke of much that she could not understand, but his obscurities
+were an intoxication, and not, as those of other men, a dread.  She
+felt there was something wide and fine behind his words; a coherence,
+an integrity; she was vaguely pleased to feel it there, though its
+quality did not interest her at all.  What did was her own expansion in
+the atmosphere of sympathetic confidence it had created.
+
+Her expansiveness was, at times, distasteful to him.  The secrets of a
+woman's moral toilet-table may be more disconcerting than those her
+boudoir guarded.  To be discursive about either seemed to him to lack
+the finer reticence of life.  A man's sight, if he could see at all,
+was a sufficient sentry to his admiration; and the little it allowed
+him he might be suffered to enjoy.  To label the false wherever one
+found it would be to leave a world only fit for fools.
+
+Terence, however, wronged her by imagining her confidences habitual.
+He suggested the insecurity of entrusting such things to men.
+
+"To men!" she exclaimed, shrinking.  "Do you suppose I do?"
+
+He did; but renounced the conception penitently in view of her dismay,
+and lent a more consciously honoured, if more embarrassed ear.  But
+compassion overcame his embarrassment; and he thought less often of her
+indiscretions than of her loneliness.
+
+She asked him to spend a week at Wallingford when the season was over.
+
+"I have very few friends," she said; "and no one but you has ever
+helped me to understand."
+
+He wondered to what he had helped her, and whether he would recognize
+it if she told him; but he did not wonder if he might remit the
+helping; the disadvantage in the gift of oneself being that the giving
+is never at an end.
+
+So he came to Wallingford again in September, when the moonlight fell
+nightly on white veils of mist, and the world took on a golden ripeness
+in the mellow silent days.
+
+Some letters, in the meanwhile, had passed between them; letters which
+might have made Terence uneasy had he known what they meant.  Instead,
+he answered them, and consigned their intentions to the chaos of
+feminine incomprehensibility.  Some of that chaos took a shape during
+his second stay at Wallingford sufficiently definite and disconcerting.
+
+It was probably only what had been put, to no purpose, in her letters,
+but it had another significance when spoken with rather uncomfortable
+pauses and lit with the intensity of a woman's very lovely eyes.
+
+To mistake its meaning was impossible; to ignore it seemed to Terence a
+contemptible discretion.  He could not withdraw his sympathy because it
+had been so dangerously misapplied, but he tried, with fraternal
+frankness, to abstract from it the odour of personality with which she
+had scented it.
+
+He hoped to animate her with the big issues of life, but to a woman
+there is often no issue bigger than a man's devotion.
+
+As they hung in the skiff beneath the birches of the mill-pond one
+breathless afternoon, she let him realize the fruitlessness of his
+intentions.
+
+The sun that filled the drowsy air fell in dazzling patches on her
+white frock; there was not a sound save the dull drone of the weir, and
+deep in the shade a kingfisher sat motionless above the water, like a
+blue flame upon the bough.
+
+She had been silent for some while after his last remark, looking away
+from him towards the river; then, to Terence's dismay, she leant
+forward, hiding her face in her hands, and began to sob.
+
+He was paralyzed by his ignorance of any cause for tears, perplexed
+with self-reproaches, helplessness, and pity.  It seemed equally absurd
+to ask why she was crying, or to offer comfort until he knew.  He sat
+wretchedly mute for some moments, and at last begged her to let him
+hear what ailed her.
+
+She did not answer till he had repeated the request, and then faltered
+between her sobs: "Oh, you wouldn't understand, you couldn't
+understand: I've got no one to care for me, no one, no one!"
+
+He could think of no response to that which did not sound inane.  He
+had not heard a woman cry since his sisters left the schoolroom, and no
+other form of consolation occurred to him than the brotherly caresses
+which had served him then.
+
+Yet not till his ineptitude and apparent apathy became intolerable did
+he lean forward from the thwart and rest his hand upon her knee.
+
+With the channel of that touch between them, the soothing trifles
+became easy which had been impossible of speech before.
+
+Uncertain of what she might find consoling, he spoke as to a child whom
+he had found in tears; a murmur merely of the gentleness and pity which
+were in his heart.
+
+She paid, for some time, no heed to him, but her sobs relaxed, and
+presently, though with her face still hidden, she laid a wet hand on
+his.
+
+"Do you really mean it?" she faltered searchingly.
+
+"Of course I mean it," he replied, wondering what his meaning was
+supposed to be, but resolute to stand to this poor creature for any
+kindness and fortitude there might be in the world.
+
+"You're very, very good," she said; but her eyes had in them, even to
+his discernment, an appreciation of another sort of worth.
+
+That was at the beginning of the afternoon; yet, though he sculled her
+up stream later, to taste, melting in the heated air, the moist
+coolness under Bensington weir, and higher, afterwards, to the "Swan"
+for tea, she made no reference to that understanding which was by him
+so little understood.
+
+But she was more than usually silent, and there was a dream-haze across
+the purple depths of her eyes, which only parted when she looked at
+him.  Then the wonderful colour seemed to flood them, and she smiled
+faintly in the furthest crevice of her lips, as though they had been
+touched by the tips of some feathery pleasure.
+
+But to Terence that sweetness of a shared secret in her smile was
+immensely discomposing.
+
+That, he recognized, when he came to look back, was the moment of
+warning.
+
+At that he had his fears, never stirred before; at that he should have
+taken flight.
+
+Flight was the way of men; of men timorous and importuned; perhaps,
+often, the only way.  But he had not the courage for such a show of
+fear; even flight seemed to affront a woman's confidence.
+
+A sheaf of letters at breakfast offered him that bridge of fabulous
+affairs over which so many a man of wider experience would have
+escaped.  But he gave it never a thought.  Where was fraternity in the
+world if one had to flee from the first woman who dared to claim it?
+He would as soon have fled from an infectious fever!
+
+There were closer points in the comparison than he supposed--though the
+world does not equally admire the man who imperils the safety of his
+life and him who risks the peace of it--but perception of them would
+not have changed his mind.
+
+He stayed because he could not go.
+
+The morning of the day that followed was spent by every one on the
+shady lawn.  It was too hot for even the theory of movement, and plans
+were postponed until the afternoon.  Terence had meant to sketch a
+piece of stonework at Ewelme Church, but found himself engaged by his
+hostess to drive her to Nuneham.
+
+Whether she intended to go there or not, she pleaded the heat as an
+excuse for deferring the start till it became too late to make one.
+
+They had tea in the little Doric shrine that overlooked the river, and
+she took him afterwards up to the wood that rose behind the house.
+
+Seated on a stile within it, against which he leaned, she told him the
+dream with which her eyes had been clouded the day before; told it with
+a hesitating persuasiveness which made dissent seem brutal; the dream
+of an ethereal alliance to which the man should bring a life, and the
+woman a use for it.
+
+Terence listened stupefied as the naïve unsteady voice made out its
+astounding offer.  She had gathered somehow his desire for such a
+thing; the magnifying power of her vanity must have revealed it in all
+he did and said.  And her abysmal lack of humour concealed its
+grotesque disparities.  He, so it seemed, was to contribute his
+existence, and she, a smile.
+
+But if its seriousness was an absurdity, its absurdities were serious.
+Terence heard them with grave lips; heard in them, too, the diffident
+whispers of his pity swollen by her fancy to a blare of passion.
+
+It was serious enough as she sounded it, and sad enough too.
+Disillusionment, even the gentlest, seemed out of the question.
+
+How, to a woman who rides, triumphing in his devotion, through the
+barriers of her decorum, is a man to say, "I do not love you"?
+
+There was nothing less that could be said: nothing less, at least, that
+was not a lie: for less, to her ears, would have said nothing.  Love
+alone was her warrant, her title; and she had thrust his love into her
+helm.
+
+There could be no other disillusionment but to take that from her, and
+to take it from her was to drag her to the dust.
+
+So Terence listened.  The bronze stems of the hazel saplings shone
+before him like prison bars, but he nodded now and then as she spoke
+her faith, and gazed at the golden air that burned beyond them in the
+west.
+
+"I've never trusted any man enough," she ended, "to tell him all that
+I've told you; but you've made me believe in you; I don't know how.  I
+suppose it really is because you're good and true.  But are you quite,
+quite sure I mean so much to you, and that caring for me won't spoil
+your life?"
+
+"One never knows what may spoil one's life," said Terence gravely "and
+seldom what may spoil another's; but I think it's true that you may
+trust me, and I'll try to be to you the friend that you desire."
+
+He gave her his hand with boyish candour; and she held it, saying
+nothing, and not looking into his face.
+
+When she released it, presently, she slid from the stile; and, turning,
+faced the sunset which had gilded his hair.
+
+She was standing close to and partly in front of him, and so watched
+with him for a while, in silence, the setting splendours of the day.
+
+Then, with a little sigh, she leaned back against his shoulder.  Thus
+they stood some moments longer without a word; Terence braced to bear
+her weight; braced mentally to meet whatever might be coming, conscious
+of the beat against him of her quickened breath.
+
+Then, with her dark head tilted back, she turned her face slowly
+towards him till it almost touched his lips.
+
+For an instant he hated her, fiercely, impotently.  The next, he put
+his hand gently upon her shoulder and kissed her cheek.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+That kiss dated naturally a new era in their relations; not outwardly
+at first, to an appreciable extent, but with a difference immense in
+implication, in understanding.
+
+Terence, forced to stay at Wallingford a day longer than he had
+intended, tried to put the added time to profit.
+
+He saw that the chief danger lay in the hazy country of her
+expectations.
+
+Her life had been turned upside down with joy, its dulness was on fire
+with an undreamed-of satisfaction; and she neither knew nor cared what
+might come next, so long as it kept the flame that was lit in her alive.
+
+She lived for the unexpected, and she would show no discrimination in
+accepting it.  Everything in that land was so new to her that no one
+thing seemed more alien than another; nothing had a special air of
+peril or of safety, of warning or of promise: all things were equally
+and perturbingly improbable, and supreme.
+
+Terence realized how vague suddenly had become all her boundaries of
+conduct, and desired without delay to fix a frontier beyond which
+neither of them should go.
+
+He would withdraw from nothing that his kiss had even seemed to
+promise; but he wished to put what it had not inalterably beyond her
+reach.
+
+The optimism of such a hope can only be accounted for by his absolute
+ignorance of women; but her shyness, in a situation so strange to her,
+seemed to justify it while he remained at Wallingford.
+
+But later, as her letters began to multiply, he realized how profound
+was his mistake.  She rode her fancy wherever it led her, and he might
+as well have tried to fix a frontier for the north wind.
+
+She wrote persistently of his love, of its greatness, its gladness, its
+splendid illumination of her life.
+
+Her exultation in a thing which had no real existence was terrible to
+Terence.
+
+Her dull unhappy being was transformed by a miracle as wonderful as
+that which creates the glory of painted wings from a withered chrysalis.
+
+And he had wrought it.  He, by some ignorant magic, had set her life
+afloat on pinions frailer and more resplendent than a butterfly's, to
+touch which roughly was to destroy her.
+
+That was, of course, too brutal to be thought of.  He must accept what
+he had done, however little he had meant to do it; must trust to time
+to dull its marvel and bring the woman back to earth.
+
+But there seemed little likelihood of that at first, and with the
+increasing rapture of her letters Terence grew ever more dismayed.
+
+Yet if he tried to lure her down to sanity, an agonized reply would be
+flung at him by the post's return, only to make his fears more vivid,
+and to compel from him, in sheer abasement, an expression of sentiment
+which he not only did not possess, but would have shrunk from
+possessing.
+
+"Swear," she had written, not once, nor twice; "swear that you love no
+other woman; that you have never loved another woman; that I fill all
+your thoughts!"
+
+Those were easy oaths, and true; but they did not content her.  It was
+not enough that no other woman had a lien upon his past: his whole
+existence must be proscribed for her.
+
+"Tell me," she prayed, "that I shall be everything to you always!  It
+kills me to think that any love could move you after mine.  I cannot
+have renounced my pride, my honour, my self-respect, for less than
+that."
+
+He could but smile unmirthfully at her renunciations.  His were
+privileges, it seemed, to her thinking, that any man might sigh for;
+though apparently they were to include a monastic seclusion from the
+world of sense, a virginity devoted, not to her passion--and for
+passion a man might be content to live or die--but to her sentimental
+fancies.
+
+"Say," she pleaded, unsatisfied by his replies, which to such
+extortionate demands could be but vague, "say that I alone of all the
+women in the world can ever satisfy all your longings; that it would
+seem a degrading sacrilege to let any other woman come after me even in
+your thoughts!  Tell me, even though I die, that my memory must keep
+you true."
+
+He gazed at that for a day to get his breath, but the delay was all too
+long for hers.
+
+"Write, write," she panted, on the morrow; "I cannot live unless I hear
+from you.  Have you no feeling for a woman's dignity that you can give
+me over in this way to its scorn?  I fling everything that I possess
+before you, and you find it not even worth acknowledgment."
+
+What could he say?  How could he answer her?  Her blindness was
+sublime, detestable, ridiculous, as you were pleased to view it; but to
+blindness one could never refuse a hand.
+
+Distressed by a necessity of which he had been the unwitting cause,
+Terence extended his.  But his ignorance mitigated his foreboding; he
+still trusted to time.
+
+Time, however, brought him but little comfort.  If her letters became
+saner, it was only since he had thrown her insanity a sop.  When they
+met a month later his difficulties were increased.
+
+At first she had entreated him to win her respect by a display of
+repression.
+
+He was to be as other men were not, to keep her staunch by an
+undreamed-of virtue.  The lover's heart must animate to her perception
+only the unimpeachable kindness of the friend.
+
+She had her wish, but had it, perhaps, in a perfection for which she
+was not prepared.
+
+She seemed determined to leave no doubts as to his fortitude.  She hung
+upon him so literally that he had to exert not moral fibre only to
+support her.
+
+She drooped like a wreath about his shoulders, while he gazed, grim and
+ashamed, upon her hair.
+
+But she drew no consolation from his strength.  It was not strength,
+she told him, but indifference; she had asked for a sentry, and he had
+given her a statue.
+
+She tried to soften the statue by every feminine artifice, even, at
+last, by kissing its irresponsive face.
+
+He, invincibly simple, smiled at the wiles he thought were used to try
+him; and stiffened himself into the pose he had been convinced was her
+desire.
+
+If it ever had been, she outlived it before long.  Its end was
+advertised by an hysterical outbreak, which Terence never could recall
+without a shudder.
+
+They were both, at the time, in town, where they met two or three times
+a week, and he had called to bring her some tickets.
+
+She was sitting on a lounge in a remote corner of the room, and gave
+him her hand with blank indifference.
+
+Unequal always to resolve her moods, he sustained a monologue from the
+fireplace on the trifles of the hour, until her persistent silence
+compelled him to ask its cause.
+
+She replied listlessly, after some pressing, that it must be of no
+importance since he could ignore it.
+
+She had merely been deceived in him, that was all: a common thing with
+a woman.  He had proved himself to be just a man, like every other; and
+not the man of men she had supposed him.
+
+It had amused him, no doubt, to win her love; now, it seemed, he was
+tired of it.
+
+He had spoilt her life, he had destroyed her faith; but such things, of
+course, weren't worth mentioning: the great matter was, naturally, that
+a man should not be bored.
+
+Now, she supposed, they might as well end the farce between them, so
+that he could amuse himself elsewhere.  All she had lived for was over
+for ever, and she did not care what became of her.
+
+She poured out the indictment to his bewildered ears in the level tones
+of utter apathy; but when it was done she flung herself violently
+across the head of the lounge in a tempest of passionate tears.
+
+Terence, despairing of any further fitness or sanity in the affair,
+resigned himself to the situation with a sigh, and knelt beside her for
+an hour, until she appeared to draw from his caresses a renewed
+confidence in life.
+
+He left her, sufficiently depressed himself, and expecting anything but
+a letter which reached him on the morrow by the earliest post.
+
+It must have been written very shortly after his departure, which she
+had done her utmost to delay, yet it proclaimed her as too shamed by
+what had happened ever to meet him again, unless he felt himself strong
+enough to prevent such scenes in the future.
+
+Feeling strong enough for nothing, he left her letter unanswered for a
+day, and received, on the next, eight pages of aggrieved reproaches for
+having forsaken her in the hour of her greatest need.
+
+That was but the prelude to many meetings of as strange a kind.  He
+never knew in what mood he should find her, nor in which she might wish
+to find him.
+
+He believed her revulsions of propriety to be sincere, but felt she had
+no business with so many, especially since he offered her every
+assistance to avoid the need of them.  He respected her for the first,
+pitied her for the second, endured the third in silence, and then began
+to hate them.
+
+He did not expect a woman to know her own mind, but he thought her
+ignorance might be more agreeable.
+
+So passed what was for Terence a very melancholy winter.  He bore it
+with a resignation nerved by the near prospect of escape to a berth in
+Paris, which had been as good as promised him when it became vacant.
+Meanwhile Downing Street saw more of him than usual, and he took every
+opportunity of immersing himself still deeper in his work.
+
+The post he had been expecting became available in March, and, too
+modest to urge his claim or to remind his patron, he was mortified to
+find one morning that it had been filled by another.
+
+He accepted his ill-fortune silently, and only learnt a month later to
+whom he owed it.
+
+He was enlightened then by accident, the peer, in whose gift the
+appointment practically lay, happening to express a regret that Terence
+had not seen his way to accept it.
+
+"To accept it!" he replied, laughing.  "It wasn't offered me."
+
+"It wasn't offered you," said the other slowly, "because a certain
+friend of yours told me you had determined definitely, for the present,
+not to leave England."
+
+Terence met the speaker's searching glance, which smouldered with
+admonition.
+
+"I see," he smiled.  "My own fault entirely."
+
+He understood to whom the "certain friend" referred, as well as the
+warning against feminine influence in his chief's eye; and, for a
+moment of sick disappointment, he burned to confront the woman who had
+betrayed him with his knowledge of her perfidy, to fling this piece of
+unimagined baseness in her face, and so be rid of her.
+
+But he realized ruefully within an hour that no such release was
+possible, at least for him.  She had but done this thing to keep him
+near her.
+
+She would plead that to stoop to such an act of treachery to the one
+who was dearest to her only proved how ungovernable was her love.
+There would be another horrible scene.  She would threaten again to
+kill herself.  And in the end he would succumb.  Each sacrifice he had
+made for her only committed him to a fresh one.  She had cultivated
+weakness in order to revel in his strength; he had pauperized her with
+his soul.  Had she been a woman of rages, of pride, of resentments, it
+would have proved another matter; but how was it possible to hurt a
+thing that clung about one's neck.
+
+So he said no more of his discomfiture, bitter as it was to his
+ambition as well as to his hopes of freedom.  Her querulous exactions
+had already alienated his sympathies, so that it was no harder now to
+be kind to her than it had been before.
+
+And he was glad to know definitely what he had to fear from her, even
+though the definition was so inclusive.  He determined to loosen,
+slowly and gently, those tendrils of sentiment by which she clung to
+him, which were so enfeebling her self-support.
+
+But he saw that he had little to hope for save from time and the
+natural infidelity of her sex.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Time, unfortunately, seemed arrayed against him, for it was in April of
+the same year that he met Miss Lilias Anstruther.
+
+Their meeting summed up the possibilities of love at sight.  He loved
+her as she passed him on the stairs, and she him, as she afterwards
+confided, while he was being led to her for introduction, an occasion
+which has--for an Englishman, at any rate--small opportunities of
+display.
+
+But love at sight is such a miracle to the seer that he never imagines
+its duplication.  Terence saw nothing on Miss Anstruther's features but
+the attention an intelligent woman might show to any man with a name in
+the making.
+
+She imagined, in the stern set of his, boredom at having to make
+himself agreeable to a merely pretty girl.
+
+There was, in his mind, no doubt, enough to complicate a glance of
+admiration, since he saw between him and her the jealous presence of
+another woman.
+
+What that presence meant to him, now, he realized with despair.
+
+He had endured in silence its unscrupulous intrigues; he had schooled
+himself to meet the most preposterous of its requirements.  But then he
+stood alone; the worst that could be done him was the most that he need
+fear.  He could live secure since only he could suffer.
+
+Now!  He lost his breath as he thought of it.
+
+He saw Lilias several times that month.  He did not notice that it
+seemed easy to see her.  That she had a hand in that facility would
+have been the last thing to strike him.
+
+Love had come to him in the extravagant splendours it only wears for
+those who find it late, with the eyes still unsoiled through which
+youth sought it.  For, to the boy, love is only a white angel, but the
+man sees it iridescent with the colours of his accumulated years of
+hope.
+
+It was not surprising that Terence, who had never even imagined himself
+in love before, and whose every instinct forbade a paltering with its
+substitute, should have been overwhelmed by this putting forth of an
+enchantment he had long ceased to expect.
+
+He kept his head from early habit, which made the danger of losing it
+in Miss Anstruther's presence almost a delight, and he banished the
+acknowledgment of his happiness from every part of him but his eyes.
+
+There, however, in the glow of an accustomed kindliness it could escape
+recognition, and there too it was often absorbed in a stern anxiety
+when he faced the risks of its discovery by the other woman.
+
+From her he kept, with a man's timorous diplomacy, every echo of the
+girl's name, until he learnt they were acquainted.  Then he had to
+endure an inquest on his concealment, and the woman's suspicions were
+fertilized by his replies.
+
+They found food for growth later on in what she was pleased, perhaps
+rightly, to imagine a preoccupation in his manner.
+
+She was, of course, aware of his effort to dilute what was emotional in
+their intercourse, and to replace it with a tender and unashamed
+fraternity.
+
+Of that he made no secret; and she made very little of her resolve to
+thwart it.
+
+He had but small success but more than he expected.  He declined
+several invitations to Wallingford during the summer, where she had
+again a house; and when he went in August, found her, thanks partly to
+the persistence of some exacting and undesired guests, more malleable
+than she had ever been before.
+
+He had been so attentively kind to her during the season that she found
+no excuse to upbraid him, yet she showed by a dozen disdainful poses
+how fiercely she resented his determined friendliness.
+
+Meanwhile he had seen little of Lilias.  His devotion to her was too
+sensitive and too entire to allow him even to offer her his company
+while he had still, however occasionally, to bestow his kisses on
+another woman.  That woman too was still a moral charge upon him, and a
+source beside of incalculable danger.
+
+What she would not do was clearly not everywhere conterminous with what
+she should not.
+
+He had sufficiently realized that his happiness would never appeal to
+her apart from hers, and that there would be a stormy finish where hers
+ended.  But he still trusted in time, and was satisfied with the slight
+progress towards reasonableness in their relationship.
+
+Her letters continued to upbraid him with his neglect; but they began
+to hint at a reciprocal attitude.
+
+She too, they threatened, could be indifferent; the time might come
+when to his appeal there would be no response.
+
+Terence prayed devoutly for that day to hasten, as the months went on;
+and ran down in November, ostensibly for a week's hunting, to a house
+in Leicestershire where Miss Anstruther was staying.
+
+Knowing the country better than he, she offered to pilot him, and took
+him under her charge with a delightful assurance, which allowed him no
+voice nor choice of his own while out of doors.
+
+She rode straight, but used her head, in cutting out a line, to nurse
+her horse, and showed a most unfeminine appreciation of distances, save
+when the hounds were running late away from home.
+
+During the long easy amble homeward in the dusk, on such occasions
+Terence might have been led to doubt that it was inadvertence which had
+secured him so much of her company, had he not arrived at conclusions
+of much greater moment.
+
+To have found, at thirty-five when such discoveries are being despaired
+of the woman for whom his life had waited for whom, unknown, it had
+worn its innocence untainted, was sufficient of itself to monopolize
+his thoughts.
+
+In her presence he became young again; young in interests, in
+expectancy, in purposeless energies.  The whole desire of the man was
+in focus for the first time in his life.
+
+Lilias gave him her company but no other sign of liking; yet her
+company was of itself sufficient to make him insanely content.
+
+Still his fears made him cautious.  The prize was too great, the
+thought of failure too consuming, to admit of risk.
+
+So he let the winter go without a word to her of what was eating out
+his heart, using what chances offered for seeing her, but making none
+that might attract comment, and all the while attenuating the link that
+bound him to the other, and trying to accustom her to do without him.
+
+He seemed in that to be making headway.
+
+She wrote more and more rarely to him, and never in the expansive
+fashion of the past, and if he kissed her on parting, as occasionally
+she insisted, it added no warmth to his farewell.  Yet he still
+misdoubted her, and would not have put his fortune to the touch had
+Fate not forced his hand with the announcement that Miss Anstruther was
+leaving for India in the spring.
+
+He looked in vain for ways to stop her, but shyly, and conscious of a
+new distance in her manner, as though she thought his interest might be
+more explicit.
+
+On that he spoke.  Her evasions, chilly with the disdain of every
+honest woman for a philanderer, were intolerable.  He saw the risk he
+ran either way of losing her, but chose that which gave him, at any
+rate, fighting chances, and told her of his love.
+
+Three days followed in the blue of heaven; then he came back to earth,
+and took up his trouble.
+
+The other woman was at St. Raphael, so he had to write.  He would have
+vastly preferred to tell her face to face what he had done.  He had no
+courage for a fight in the dark; he wished to see the blow come back,
+and meet it.  But there were reasons insuperable against that.
+
+He expected an intemperate reply, but nothing so wildly bereft of
+reason as that which reached him.  It was shrill with threats which
+turned his blood to ice and then set it boiling with indignation;
+threats which seemed to echo from some shrieking purlieu of the Mile
+End Road.
+
+Her soul revolted, she wrote, at what he had done.  He had thrown her
+away like stale water.  His selfishness had made her life unbearable.
+Her pride, her capacity for caring, her whole womanhood had been hurt
+and crushed to death.
+
+She went about feeling there was no meaning any more in anything.  He
+had hardened and embittered her nature to a terrible degree.
+
+He had hurt her so unendurably that it didn't seem to matter how she
+hurt others.
+
+Love and truth and honour had become a farce, and loyalty was an
+unnecessary scruple.
+
+She ended by saying she did not know how long she could go on bearing
+it in silence.  The only fair thing seemed to be to tell Miss
+Anstruther everything that had happened, and let her judge between them.
+
+Despite the sense of his integrity, and a dreary memory of the months
+devoted to her whims, Terence almost felt himself to be, as he read her
+impeachment, the unspeakable brute that she described.
+
+He even tried to excuse her horrid and unexpected forms of speech; the
+clamour, the invective, the dismal absence of reserve.  If she had
+overleapt the bounds of decency he had given her the impetus, and to be
+startled by such an exhibition only argued his inexperience.
+
+Yet even his generosity could not acquit her.  He remembered her
+repeated wail, "Tell me I haven't spoilt your life!"--a cry which no
+ardour of his assurance seemed able to satisfy.  Well, now she had the
+only proof that could appease her conscience, and this was the result.
+He showed her that his life was still whole, and she itched to break it
+beyond repair.
+
+His resentment quickened.  Surely it was more than should be asked of a
+man's benevolence to sacrifice his life to no purpose for a woman's
+mistake.
+
+He wrote urgently, and as he thought in reason; but the letter read to
+her as a wrathful menace.  He had explained that in trying to hurt
+others she might hurt herself the more, since to alienate Miss
+Anstruther would be to make a lifelong enemy of himself.
+
+She replied in such spiritless dejection that he had to try to comfort
+her.  She asked why he had been in such a hurry to supersede her; and
+though his patience of many months seemed to him misnamed as hurry, he
+explained the circumstance which made him speak.
+
+Many letters passed between them: letters coloured on her part by a
+childish irresponsibility and persistence, and on his by an attempt, a
+fatal attempt, to treat her as a child, and to let her hug the little
+salves to her vanity which she invented daily and submitted piteously
+for his confirmation.
+
+Terence discovered, when it was too late, that sooner than allow that
+any one could supplant her in his affection, she had pictured his
+proposal as a man's heroic sacrifice of himself to a girl's
+forwardness, and his letters had unconsciously confirmed her fatuous
+invention.
+
+Consoled by it, she wrote to Lilias a letter of congratulation, and her
+correspondence with Terence grew heavy with the odour of a shared and
+precarious secret which she, at least, would make honourable pretences
+to ignore.
+
+Terence, at his wit's end for peace, capitulated to her self-complacent
+theory, after a half-hearted attempt to take it from her.
+
+To destroy her faith in it seemed needlessly unkind, seeing how much
+her faith in everything else appeared to be bound up therein.  And if
+her comfort in it was false, false it had been all along, from the days
+when for her sake he had fostered it.  Now, at any rate, it brought
+comfort to them both.
+
+He was shown the letter Lilias had received from her, and thought his
+danger at an end.  Yet he went softly, not daring to own the intensity
+of his happiness even to himself.  He tried to keep the joy of it from
+his mind, to walk humbly as a mortal should, lest the gods might grow
+jealous of his exulting dreams.
+
+Yet at times, despite his caution, at the higher tides of his delight,
+he would laugh up in the face of heaven, not arrogantly, but with the
+overrunning sense of his content.
+
+A woman's lips had breathed their ephphatha upon his eyelids, and he
+looked out upon a new world.
+
+New, since her beauty, like a crystal spar, lent a rainbow border to
+all things beyond it.  His life seemed lifted by a spread of wings at
+every touch of her fingers.
+
+There was a magic in her influence, that fed from the soft reluctance
+of her body the fuel that burned in his.  A magic on which he lived
+between their meetings, and for whose strange infusion he fainted while
+they were apart.
+
+He told her, laughing, that he was almost frightened to be such a
+slave; and though she paid no heed to the assertion, it sank with
+melting heat into her heart, and unknown to him the girl's breast
+throbbed, behind its shy demurs, with a fierce exultation in the sense
+that swayed him.
+
+So two months passed, the two months when even the English earth seems
+mad, mad with the surge of its triumphant greenness, and with the
+singing flood of birds that fills it from the south.
+
+From the south, too, came, in May, the other woman, giving Terence
+notice of her return, and telling him that she only wished to see him
+if he felt a meeting was not impossible.
+
+He replied that nothing could make it impossible but his ignorance of
+her address, which she had omitted to send him.
+
+He called the day after it arrived.  He had no avidity for the
+interview; but, seeing that he would be certain some day to meet her,
+thought the sooner the safer.
+
+She received him with a curious prescribed coldness, warmed in the
+strangest way by glances of reproachful pity.  She spoke in a
+compressed tone, and Terence expected that at any moment she would
+scream and seize him.  The prevision was so strong that, on leaving
+her, he practically backed to the door, keeping his eye deterrently
+fixed upon her, as though she were some savage creature that might
+spring upon him if he turned his head.
+
+She took the line throughout that, despite his perfidy, he was to be
+regarded with a grieved compassion; and she met his profession of
+attachment to the woman he was about to marry with the sad smile of a
+lenient unbelief.
+
+Once or twice the raging bitterness of a soul pent up behind it
+threatened to engulf the passive monotony of her speech, and the dull
+eyes glowed as though about to scorch him; but nothing deplorable
+happened, and Terence breathed a deep relief as the door closed behind
+him and shut off, as he trusted, from his future the only danger that
+threatened it.
+
+His confidence, however, did not live for long.  Scarcely more than a
+week later something serious in Miss Anstruther's face checked him as
+he greeted her.
+
+"Yes," she answered to his eyes, "there's something I want to ask you.
+Is it true, as you told me, that you had never loved any one before you
+met me?"
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"Did you never give any one cause to think you loved her?"
+
+"Not with intention."
+
+"But you might have without meaning to?"
+
+"I did, without meaning to."
+
+"Oh, you know?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I know.  May I ask how you do?"
+
+"No," she replied; "I'd sooner not tell you that.  I only wanted to be
+told it wasn't true."
+
+"But it is true!" he objected.
+
+"Oh, not what matters," she breathed.  "Did she care for you very, very
+much?"
+
+"She cared a good deal more than I deserved," he said gravely; "and
+more unspeakably than I desired."
+
+"But she didn't find that out?"
+
+"No, she didn't find it out.  Think what finding out would have meant
+to her."
+
+The girl was silent for a moment.
+
+"Did you kiss her?" she asked, below her breath.
+
+"I did many things I would have preferred not to," he said quietly;
+"but what they were you could not wish, I think, to learn from me."
+
+"On account of what I know?" she asked.
+
+"I don't know what you know," he replied; "but I think that no man who
+has shared, however unwillingly, a woman's secret, has any rights over
+it but those of burial."
+
+She gave him her lips with a smile, and made no further reference to
+the subject before they parted.  She was going into the country, and he
+was not to see her for ten days.
+
+He spent some part of them wondering idly whence her information had
+come, but he was in no mood to make enquiry where it might have been
+effective, and had put the question from his mind, when, at the end of
+the week, he received from Lilias a feverish note saying that
+everything between them depended on his reply to something that she
+must ask him.  Would he let her know the first moment he could come.
+
+He named the next morning, but, when leaving his rooms on the way to
+her the letter was delivered which changed the face of the world for
+him, and hung the future on his choice of an alternative.
+
+The letter was short, and passionately scornful.  It admitted no
+challenge, no reply.  She had seen, it said, all he had written to the
+other woman, and she despised him so utterly that she felt no pain in
+parting from him for ever.
+
+That was all.  Yesterday he held for her all the beauty and the savour
+of the world, to-day she loathed him as a leper.  In an hour she had
+repudiated the most sacred convictions of her soul.
+
+She had learnt his fineness at every turn of his thoughts.  Her spirit,
+that had touched his at first so timidly, had come to seek with
+passionate security its most intimate caress.  There was nothing she
+had not revealed to him, no shame so sweet nor so secret which she had
+feared to let him know.
+
+And now!
+
+"If I had loved a devil unawares," reflected Terence sadly, "I hardly
+think I would have cast her out like that.  Love should not, for its
+own dignity, degrade so easily what it has ennobled."
+
+Yet not for a moment did he resent the ruthlessness of her letter.  His
+love had indeed exalted her above possibility of that.
+
+He had lost her!  It was of nothing less that he could think.  For some
+while he did not even wonder how the astounding change had come.  Her
+brief note said nothing; nothing of what had happened in that momentous
+fortnight, nothing of the source of her enlightenment, nothing even to
+excuse the feeding of her suspicions on letters of his which were not
+addressed to her.
+
+It left, indifferently, everything to his conjecture; but conjecture
+was not difficult.
+
+The tragic ending of his hopes was the outcome, he had little doubt, of
+his last visit to the other woman.  She saw him then as hers no longer;
+saw in him too, perhaps, in spite of his concealments, a radiance which
+her love had never wrought, and realized, with cruel clearness, how
+entirely he was another's.
+
+And so, inflamed with jealousy beyond endurance, she had determined
+that no one should possess him if she might not, and had used her pain,
+malignantly, to poison the other's pleasure.
+
+That poison took no doubt at first the form of hints; a woman's pitying
+innuendoes, which had roused the girl's suspicions and been the cause
+of her demands.  And when she repeated his disclaimer, further proofs,
+he supposed, were mentioned, and finally the letters had been produced.
+
+As the story of those two short weeks took shape in his mind--the
+profitless destruction done to his life and to another's by a woman's
+venomous malice--he could, in the fierceness of his despair, have made
+an end to her with his naked hands.
+
+At that, ashamed of himself, he smiled, remembering the frequent
+vaunting of her pride and the affectations of her honour.  This was
+strange work for either of them.  But then a woman's honour was so
+detachable.
+
+She had it if you had it; and if you hadn't it, neither had she.  In
+that way her morality never placed her at a disadvantage.  She could
+always be as noble or as mean as her opponent.
+
+He smiled again, more grimly, to think that on him of all men such a
+fate had fallen.  That he who all his life had shrunk from women should
+be execrated as a philanderer!  Surely ironic comedy could go no
+further?
+
+And to consider, beside it, the kind of man, for whom London is too
+small a harem, wedded gratefully, reverently, every day, by the kind of
+woman who found him unworthy, the kind of man, alas! to whom all too
+probably, to appease that terrible vanity of a trumpeted indifference,
+she might fall: to the first brute who desired to possess her.
+
+Her fineness would not save her!  Had it ever saved a woman yet from
+such a fate?  By the blaze of his wrath he seemed to see the reason.
+
+Woman had no fineness, no sensibility, no subtlety of discernment.  Her
+fastidiousness was an affectation, like the cut of her skirt: she wore
+each because it was the fashion.  It was made for her, not by her, and
+was no part of her at all.
+
+But his anger could only for an instant find fuel to feed it in the
+woman he loved.  It turned at once against the other, and his thoughts
+turned with it to her letters, the only bond between them which
+remained.
+
+They formed the packet of many coloured papers which at last, blind
+with scorn to their sanctity, he had drawn from its secret place.
+
+He had kept them without defined intention; certainly with no
+premonition of needing them in his defence; so far as he could
+remember, only to remind himself how that strange disturbance of his
+life had come about.
+
+But now, as his anger burnt the better part of him, he saw another use
+for them.  They alone could justify, could extenuate what he had done.
+No man who had endured an undesired love could read them and condemn.
+
+But a woman?  That was another matter.  And a woman, too, who had
+adored!  How would she read their raving violence?
+
+Would she believe that the woman who wrote so wildly of the surrender
+of herself had never dreamed of giving him more by it than her lips.
+
+He wondered.  Women were so hopelessly ignorant of one another.  So
+unable to conceive as womanly any qualities but their own; so unable to
+believe even in the existence of a compulsion which would not move
+themselves.
+
+Well, whether she believed or not, whether she would divine and
+forgive, or be confirmed in her contempt, there remained no other way
+to move, nor even to approach her.
+
+It was horrible to have received such letters from a woman one did not
+love, more horrible still to use them in one's defence.  But she had
+left him no alternative.
+
+It was through her offence that he came to be fighting for what was
+dearer than his life.  Was any right left her to complain of his weapon?
+
+Besides, as he assured himself, he would only be enlarging a story
+which she had told: it was her tongue, not his, that had proclaimed it.
+And whether happiness or despair came to him from the event, it could
+at least bring her no change of fortune.
+
+But with the very assertion of her security came apprehension from a
+possibility he had not foreseen.
+
+What if Lilias, finding that those letters in no way absolved him, but
+proved the woman guilty of an unforgivable perfidy, should turn
+vengefully against her the secrets which they held?
+
+The fear swept clear his clouded honour.  Here was he answering a
+woman's baseness in the very fashion he had impeached as her habitual
+use.
+
+He was fighting her malicious treachery with a betrayal as infamous,
+and which could be no whit excused by hers.
+
+The sacredness of such letters could not be altered by circumstances;
+love had written them for love's eye only, and they must be held
+inviolable though love turned to hate.
+
+And it was not only his personal honour that restrained him, but the
+honour of love itself; the silence, the gravity which every great
+service imposes upon those who have borne it; the duty of handing down
+unsullied, unspoken of, the proud name the brave tradition to those
+that come after.
+
+It was because Love had indeed touched him with its sceptre that he
+could shield in silence one who had worn its name unworthily even while
+under it she had stabbed him to the heart.
+
+He laid his hand upon the packet to return it to its place.  Then, with
+sudden hesitation and a rueful smile at the sense of his own weakness,
+he rose and carried it across to the grate.
+
+He laid it on the coals and lit a match beneath it; and, as he turned
+away again towards the window, heard in the blaze his hope and his
+despair together flame indifferently to the sky.
+
+
+
+
+The Measure of a Man
+
+
+
+I
+
+The light shore breeze of a September morning was dying out across the
+bay.  The wide Atlantic beyond it seemed flat as a floor of sapphire
+inlaid with pale veins of green.  The sky was without a cloud; and the
+sun filled the unstirred silence with a clear golden heat.
+
+The high gray cliffs that held the bay, hid, at either end, the land
+beyond it; half hid even, by a curve of their contour, the entrance to
+Ballindra River, so that no sign of habitation was to be seen along the
+shore.
+
+The blue spaces of the sea were empty, save for a little lug-rigged
+boat which had slipped out of the river while the mists still slept
+upon it, and had spent the morning creeping with each soft breath of
+air to the northern border of the bay.
+
+It was now close to land, so close that the object of its journey could
+be plainly seen.
+
+Before it, cradled, under the cliffs, between the serried ledges of
+rock, was a tiny beach.
+
+It was in shape like a young moon, paved in silvery pink and pearl by
+milk-white pebbles and delicate shells, with shelving wings of stone
+thrust out and bent inward from either side into the sea.
+
+The long ledges of rock were of a dark lavender, and from them a
+brilliant yellow weed dripped and swung in the transparent pool of
+purple and emerald, which throbbed softly against the pearly crescent
+of the shore.
+
+East and west, so far as eye could reach, the sea pushed a sparkling
+shoulder against the sheer front of the cliffs.  Nowhere else in the
+whole bay was there a foot's breadth of beach, and there was clearly no
+outlet landwards even from the slender strand towards which the boat
+was heading.
+
+A girl with fair hair and luminous gray eyes was steering, and a man of
+about thirty sat upon the opposite gunwale with the slack sheet in his
+hand.  She looked up at the flapping leech, and then with a whimsical
+smile into his face.
+
+"You'll have to row in," she said.
+
+"Not I," he protested airily; "we're going to sail."
+
+She laughed a low contented laugh at his perversity.
+
+"Like this?" she enquired, tilting her head at the empty canvas.
+
+"Give the wind time," he replied, with a glance across the bay and a
+big indrawn breath of complete satisfaction; "we've the whole day
+before us."
+
+"We haven't the whole channel, though," she said, nodding to starboard,
+where a black fin of rock cut suddenly in the clear water a little
+whispering ring of foam.
+
+"Phew!" exclaimed the man, screwing round on the gunwale as the black
+fin disappeared.  "Many like that?"
+
+"Plenty, plenty!" laughed the girl.  "Are you going to row?"
+
+He shook his head.  Then, with an effect of having completely forgotten
+her, stared eagerly across that wavering jewel of water at the rose and
+silver of the beach, and down through the transparent purple depths
+beneath him at the sand and the rocks and the waving yellow weed.
+
+She watched his face brighten with their beauty, as though somehow he
+had absorbed it, and his grave good looks take on a boyish lightness,
+as his eyes turned from colour to colour, or followed the sea-fern
+streaming in the pulse of the tide.  Leaning forward with a smile she
+laid her hand on the cleat in front of her and let the halyard go.  The
+brown sail ran down till the parrel jammed, and Maurice Caragh faced
+round reproachfully.
+
+"Why don't you want to row?" she cried.  "It isn't a hundred yards."
+
+"No, I know," he sighed, as he freed the clip of the traveller and
+gathered in the bunt; "but a sail looks so much more adventurous."
+
+"Even in a calm?" she smiled.
+
+"Oh, yes, most in a calm," he replied, seating himself disconsolately
+on the thwart in front of her, and slowly pushing out a sweep.
+"Adventure's nothing with a full sail, but all the fear of the sea is
+in the flat one.  Look here!" he continued, without change of tone,
+"the rowlocks are gone."
+
+She thrust out the point of a little white shoe at the place where they
+lay beneath his thwart, and he pushed them resignedly into their
+chocks, and pulled for the shore; Lettice Nevern standing up with her
+finger tips on the tiller behind her, and her eye intent upon the
+channel.
+
+Her quick emphatic directions amused the man who was rowing, as the
+boat wound through the invisible maze.
+
+"Goodness!" he exclaimed, backing hard with his left, "I shouldn't care
+to bring a boat in here with a bit of wind."
+
+"You couldn't," she replied, "with any wind but what we've got.  That's
+what I like about it.  There are not ten days in the year you can dare
+to land here.  But this half tide is the worst; it's easier with less
+or more water."
+
+"Do you ever come here by yourself?" he asked, resting on the oars.
+
+"I've always come by myself," she answered, looking down into his face,
+"that's why"--she hesitated for a moment--"that's why I didn't bring
+you before."
+
+The reason might not have seemed explicit to another, but it carried a
+sense of privilege to Caragh's mind that troubled the look with which
+he acknowledged it.
+
+"I hope I mayn't prove unworthy of it," he said gravely.
+
+"I don't know," she answered, with an absent glance at him: "it's a
+very dear little beach."
+
+He was willing to admit, when he landed, that it might be anything she
+pleased to call it, but there was chiefly wonder in his eye.  The bands
+of tiny white and silver pebbles, and of tinier pink shells, made a
+floor so delicate, so incredibly dainty as seemed, in that land of
+legend, proof sufficient of a fairy's treading.
+
+The water lay so still and clear against it that only by the brighter
+tint of the covered pebbles could the margin of the sea be told, and
+the moving tide that swayed the weed made all along the curved strand a
+little whispering song, unlike any other music in the world.
+
+Lettice enjoyed Caragh's bewilderment for a moment, but stopped him as
+he was bringing the cable ashore.
+
+"You must moor her out," she said.
+
+"Oh, no!" he pleaded, "the tide's rising, and she'll look so jolly and
+so impossible nosing along the shore with all that water under her, on
+the very edge of an ocean."
+
+But Lettice was inflexible.  The tide would be lower she said by the
+time they started; and Maurice had to shove the boat out again, and
+succeeded, after a couple of vain attempts, in jerking the anchor off
+her bow on to a holding bottom.
+
+"Oh, well," he said cheerfully, eyeing the result of his labour, while
+he unpacked the luncheon, "she looks very well out there; only I wish
+I'd put up the sail."
+
+"Are you quite mad to-day?" the girl asked.
+
+She sat watching him with an air of grave amusement; her feet drawn up
+and her hands clasped below her knees.  She wore a white serge coat and
+skirt, with a biscuit-coloured silk shirt and a ribbon of the same
+shade round her sailor hat.  She looked much younger than her
+twenty-three years, though the baby-fairness of her hair and skin were
+sobered by the quiet depths of her gray eyes.
+
+"I'm never mad," said Caragh to her question, holding up the red length
+of a lobster against the sky, "but sometimes, with you, I'm less
+distressingly sane than usual."
+
+Lettice, her hands fallen to her ankles, watched him sideways, with one
+temple resting on her knee.
+
+"That's the reflection of my foolishness, I suppose?" she said.
+
+"Possibly!" he assented; "I'm very highly polished."
+
+He was sitting with his feet towards the sea, unpacking the hamper on
+to a spread cloth beside him.  He viewed the result appreciatively.
+
+"Two bells!" he announced to Lettice.  "We're going to do ourselves
+well."
+
+His prediction, however, only applied to himself, for Lettice ate even
+less than usual; an amount, he had once declared, absurdly incompatible
+with her splendid air of health.
+
+She offered him no assistance in clearing up, but he showed a proper
+sense of his privilege, by refusing even to throw the lobster claws
+into the sea.  Lettice smiled at the chaos of fragments he insisted on
+repacking.
+
+"Bridget will have ideas of your economy when she opens that," she
+suggested.
+
+"She'll guess perhaps that we lunched in Paradise," he said.
+
+They walked to the limits of it when he had finished, and sat on the
+outermost spur of rock.
+
+The ocean was like glass; yet the water pulsed to and fro past them
+between the long limestone ledges, as it rose and fell with the breath
+of the sleeping blue breast of the sea.
+
+And the tender sounds of it never ceased.  Soft thumps in the blind
+tunnels beneath them, a crystal kiss that whitened an edge of stone,
+the whisper of clear rillets that ran up and tinkled down again,
+finding no pool to hold them; and, under all, the brushing, backwards
+and forwards in the moving water, of the yellow tangle of weed.
+
+Caragh remained but a short time in the seat he had chosen.  Rising, he
+stood at the margin of the sea, shifting his footing now and then, to
+scan some fresh wonder of colour, and with his ears intent on the soft
+complexity of sound.  He seemed entirely to have forgotten his
+companion's presence, and Lettice watched him with an interest which
+became annoyed.
+
+"One would think you had never seen such a thing before," she said.
+
+He turned at the sound of her words, but came more slowly to their
+meaning.
+
+"Oh, one never has seen, or heard, anything before; it's always
+different," he replied, smiling.  "Just listen to that little pool
+emptying; it runs up a whole octave, but such a queer scale! yet a
+minute ago I couldn't hear it!  And the comic cadence of the water in
+that gully, it almost makes one laugh.  How old Bach would have played
+with it.  But you don't hear?"
+
+"Not a note," she said with tight lips; "but I've no ear."
+
+Caragh caught the tone of grievance.  He smiled across at her.
+
+"It's sheer vanity to say that," he tossed back; "but I'll admit if
+your ears were smaller no one could see them."
+
+He stepped over the intervening ledges, and they picked their way side
+by side to the beach.
+
+"But it is wonderful," he continued, "that there's a whole world round
+us that we listen to and look at for years and years, yet never either
+hear or see till some strange fortunate moment."  He put his hand under
+her outstretched arm as her balance wavered upon a ridge.  "Why, this
+may be Paradise after all, only we don't notice the angels."
+
+His fingers closed on her elbow as she slipped upon a piece of weed.
+
+"You shouldn't avow it, though you do ignore me," she said
+reproachfully.
+
+"Ah," he sighed, as they stepped down upon the strand, "you do no
+justice to my plural.  I wasn't thinking of the sort of paradise that
+may be made by one pair of wings.  All the same," he went on
+reflectively, throwing himself upon the beach beside her, "it isn't as
+an angel that I've ever thought of you."
+
+The tide was almost at its full, and the clear deep water with its thin
+crystal lip, which opened and shut upon the stones, was only a yard or
+two from Miss Nevern's feet.
+
+Her little white shoes were thrust out straight before her, heels
+together, pointing to the sky, and she leaned forward looking over them
+across the bay.
+
+At Caragh's words she turned her face towards him, with the vague
+depths of some conjecture in her eyes, as though disposed to ask him
+how, if not as an angel, he had ever thought of her.  But she turned
+her eyes again, without speaking, to the topaz hills beyond the bay.
+
+Maurice lay a moment looking at her silent profile, then, standing in
+front of her, he spread out the wide white skirt fan-wise on either
+side of her feet.
+
+"Now you're perfectly symmetrical," he said, contemplating her from
+above.
+
+She lifted her eyes to his from the distant hills with a smile.
+
+"It would make a charming thing in marble," he continued; "almost
+Egyptian and yet so immensely modern.  Only some fool of a critic would
+be certain to ask what it meant."
+
+"And what would you say?"
+
+He gave the statue a moment's further consideration.
+
+"Well, that it wasn't meant for him, anyway," he replied, dropping down
+again beside her.
+
+"Could you tell him what it meant for you?" she enquired, without
+moving.
+
+"Not to save my life," he said at once; adding, as if to reassure
+himself, "but I know."
+
+"You could tell me, perhaps?" she suggested presently.
+
+"Heavens, no!" he exclaimed.  "You least of all.  You'd think me crazy."
+
+"Oh, I think you that as it is," she admitted thoughtfully.
+
+He laughed, but with his eyes still occupied with the beauty of her
+bent figure.
+
+He filled his left hand absently with the little shells on which he
+lay, shaking them up and down on his open palm, till only a few were
+left between his fingers.  As he dropped these into the other hand, his
+eye fell upon them.
+
+"I say!  what dear little things!" he exclaimed enthusiastically.  "Why
+didn't you tell me about them?"
+
+Lettice turned her head.
+
+"I thought you'd seen them," she said indifferently.
+
+"They're quite incredible," he went on, too absorbed in his discovery
+to notice her tone; "how is it that, with an ocean falling on them
+here, they're not ground to gruel.  They make me feel more than ever an
+interloper.  You should have moored me out in the boat: this floor was
+laid for naiads and fays and pixies; for nothing so heavy-footed as a
+man."
+
+"Or a woman," Lettice suggested, still seated as he had posed her, but
+watching his search among the pebbles with her chin against her
+shoulder.
+
+"Cover those number threes!" he said, without looking up from it,
+picking out the tiniest shells into a little pink heap upon his hand.
+
+"They're not number threes," she retorted; "and they have to carry
+_me_.  You'd find them heavy enough if you were under them."
+
+He glanced up quickly at the half-hidden outline of the face behind her
+shoulder.
+
+"I daresay," he murmured.
+
+Something in the manner of his agreement brought the colour into her
+cheek, and, perhaps to hide it, she leant over towards him, and,
+propped on one elbow, began to search for the little shells and drop
+them into his hand.
+
+She noticed, as she had never before had opportunity, the suggestion of
+a fine capacity in the shape of his open hand, and the sharp decision
+of its rare creases.
+
+"How deep your lines are!" she said.
+
+He looked with enquiry at the darkened features which were bent above
+his hand, and in reply she raked with a nail, as pink as and more
+polished than they, the little pile of shells back towards his thumb.
+
+"Oh, that!" he exclaimed, as she ran the tip of her finger along the
+furrow.  "It's wonderful, isn't it?  I never saw a heart line on any
+hand that filled me with such respect.  Cut evidently by one of those
+obstinately permanent affections that make one gasp in books.  Let's
+look at yours?"
+
+She opened, smiling, on a very rosy palm, a network of slender lines,
+grated and interlaced.
+
+"Oh, shut it up!" he frowned.  "Hide it from your dearest friend.  Ah,
+my simplicity which thought you so different from all that!"
+
+She laughed, and screwing up her hand looked down into its little cup.
+
+"Well," she said; "tell me what you see in it."
+
+But he shook his head.
+
+"I shut my eyes," he declared solemnly.  "Hold it a little further off."
+
+"I shan't," she said.
+
+"I mean," he explained, "that a yard away it's everything that one
+could wish."
+
+She surveyed her hand reflectively.  There had been those who wished it
+a good deal nearer than that; and who had wished in vain.
+
+"At what people call a safe distance, I suppose," she said.  "I think
+you're very fond of safe distances."
+
+He almost started at the touch of scornful provocation in the words and
+in the tone.  A delightful indifference to what he was or wasn't fond
+of had made hitherto, by its very exclusions, so much possible between
+them.
+
+"Do you?" he replied, his eyes still upon her bent figure.  "Why?"
+
+"You weren't aware of it?" she asked.
+
+"I wasn't.  I haven't been told of it before."
+
+"Perhaps, it's only with me?" she suggested.
+
+"Perhaps, it's only with you," he smiled.  "How does it show?"
+
+She made, with her slender nail, little moons in the sand.
+
+"It doesn't show," she said, looking down at her finger; "one feels it."
+
+"A general attitude of caution," he suggested playfully; "such as this."
+
+"As what?" she enquired.
+
+"Oh!" he said, with a wave of his hand at the enclosing wall of cliff
+and the empty vastness of the sea, "this teeming beach, the fashionable
+resort behind it, the chaperon at our elbow!"
+
+She glanced at him with a shy smile.
+
+"Oh, not in that way," she said; "besides you couldn't help yourself;
+you were brought.  No, one sees it mostly in the things you say."
+
+"In the things I say?"
+
+"Well, no! perhaps, in the things you don't say."
+
+"I see!" he mused, with the same air of banter, "the desert areas of
+omission!  Others made them blossom for you like the rose?  I don't
+succeed in even expressing things that were commonplaces with them?"
+
+"What sort of things?" she asked, her eyes again upon the sand.
+
+"Oh, you know them probably, better than I," he said; "being a woman
+and used to them."
+
+"To what?"
+
+"To the ordinary masculine fatuities of admiration, for instance."
+
+"No," she said reflectively; "you don't succeed in expressing those.
+Do you try?"
+
+"Not much, I'm afraid.  They offend me."
+
+"_You!_" she exclaimed, surprised into facing him with lifted brows,
+"you might have said they would offend a woman."
+
+"I might have, years and years ago!" he replied; "but that passed with
+other elevating superstitions of one's youth.  Since then I've observed
+an unpleasant variety in admirations, but have yet to meet the offended
+woman.  No, a woman may call you a fool for your flummery, or even
+think you one; but she'll give you every opening to repeat the folly."
+
+The surprise in Lettice Nevern's eyes grew more serious.
+
+"You think a man should never tell a woman that he admires her?" she
+said.
+
+"He needn't appraise her to her face like a fat ox in a show-pen!
+unless--oh, well, unless, I suppose, she likes it."
+
+"And then?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Oh, then, one might say, she's qualified for the show-pen.  Let him
+tie on the ticket."
+
+A stain of duller red upon the girl's cheek would have betrayed some
+quickening of her thought, had he been looking at her, instead of out
+across the purple level of the sea, where, above Ballindra, the harbour
+hills were turning in the slanting sunlight from topaz to amethyst.
+
+The smile of humorous toleration with which Maurice Caragh accepted
+half the perplexities of life had always seemed to her so completely to
+reveal his mind--like the pool before them, through which the light
+filtered to the very floor--that this dark humour of depreciation let
+out the sounding line through her fingers into unanchorable depths.
+
+"I think you're a little hard," she said slowly; "women aren't vain, as
+a rule; at least not like that.  It's their humility that makes them
+care so much to be admired."
+
+"I see," he smiled.  "But I don't object to the admiration; that's
+inevitable; only to the way it's paid."
+
+"But how is a woman to know if you don't tell her?"
+
+"Do you ask?" he said.
+
+"I?" she questioned.  "Why?"
+
+"I thought the last fortnight would have taught you that," he said
+quietly.
+
+Her eyes flashed upon him ere she could prevent them, and from the
+flash her cheeks took colour as though they faced a flame.
+
+But she was playing with the shells in her hand again before he noticed
+that she had moved her head, but the tip of her forefinger trembled as
+she pushed the tiny pink heap across her palm.
+
+"Taught me what?" she murmured.
+
+"What I couldn't say," he replied, adding determinedly, as she would
+not help him, "how much I admired you."
+
+She turned her face half way towards him with a little pathetic
+distrustful smile.
+
+"Couldn't you see it?" he said.
+
+Her under lip quivered as her mouth moved to answer him; then, as
+though afraid to trust the simplest word to it, she shook her head.
+
+Caragh saw the quiver, and every fibre in him seemed resonant with that
+vibration; seemed to ring with pity and tenderness and shame, as a bell
+reverberates to a mere thread of sound.
+
+The thing was happening which had never happened to him before; with
+which, in a varied adventure with women, he had never had to charge his
+soul; for, until to-day, he had not stolen wittingly a girl's love.
+
+"I thought it was plain enough," he went on warily; "I couldn't have
+given my eyes much more to say."
+
+"Oh, your eyes!" came her deprecation.
+
+He waited a second.
+
+"Well, you see," he temporized, "I'm shy, and I didn't know how else to
+say it, but I hoped you'd understand."
+
+He let the vague uncommitting words slip slowly from him, as a man pays
+out a cable which he cannot make fast, with rocks astern of him, and
+the last fathom at any moment in his fingers.  Would she come to his
+help, he wondered, with a laugh or a light word, or must he go on to
+the inevitable end.
+
+Lettice said nothing; her glance, lifted from her hand, looked away
+past him absently across the bay.  But in its aversion he read that she
+understood--more even than he asked; understood that a man may be
+craven enough to let his eyes do what his lips dare not.  She was not
+coming to his help; but he might, so her silence said, jump overboard
+and save himself, and let her and his honour go together upon the rocks.
+
+"Well!" he went on in lighter tones, as though to suggest their
+adoption, "I'm afraid my mute eloquence was wasted.  Must I stoop to
+speech?"
+
+The girl's eyes still gazed dreamily across the water.
+
+"What for?" she said.
+
+She might, as many a woman would, have left his hesitation no
+alternative; have given with some touch of tenderness, of reluctance,
+even of acerbity, that hint of the expected from which, for his honour,
+there could be no appeal.  But she chose not to.  Perhaps it was her
+diffidence that decided, perhaps her pride.
+
+Anyway she left to him the freedom of his embarrassment, such as it was.
+
+He must extricate himself, but he himself should choose how.  It was
+clear that he had not chosen when he spoke again.
+
+"You see," he said, with the same airy extenuation; "I'm such a bad
+talker that I leave as little as possible to my tongue.  It is so
+often, to my thought, like the nervous listener who insists on
+supplying the last word to a sentence; the wrong word, but the word one
+has, out of good manners, to use."
+
+She was looking at him now, but with no meaning in her eyes.
+
+"That's why," he continued, "I couldn't trust it to say how ... how
+grateful I was for you."
+
+"_For_ me?" she questioned.
+
+"You see I can't trust it yet," he pleaded ruefully.  "Yes, _for_ you:
+for everything about you that's so delightful and unlooked for; the
+charm----"
+
+At that her eyes stopped him.  He had looked up suddenly as though he
+felt the blaze of them hot upon his face.
+
+"Am _I_ in the show-pen?" she said quietly.
+
+That settled it, he felt.  Well, she had every right to her challenge;
+he had put it into her mouth.
+
+It was characteristic, curiously enough, of his fortuitous nature,
+that, despite the unedifying fashion in which his intention had
+hitherto hung and veered--nosing, as it were, the wind of opportunity
+for a flaw that suited it--he put his helm over now with irrevocable
+decision.
+
+"You've cause to ask that," he said with a smile, "since I left out the
+only reason that seems to make admiration speakable."
+
+"Yes?" she asked simply.  "What is it?"
+
+He raised himself from his elbow, on to his wrist, with one knee
+beneath him, straightening himself with respectful homage to the
+occasion.
+
+"Adoration!" he replied.  "No man's eulogies can be an insult to the
+woman he adores."
+
+Her eyes, brave enough before, would not meet that, and he saw the vain
+attempt to steady the rebellious tenderness of her lips.  Their tremor
+touched him as it had before; his voice lost its little air of drama
+and dropped into the boyish plainness which so well became it.
+
+"Please," he explained, "I should have said that first: only I didn't,
+because I thought you knew it.  I'm not silly enough to suppose it
+matters whether I adore you or not, except just as an apology, the only
+apology for what I oughtn't to have said."
+
+She was looking down deliberately at the hand on which she leant, and
+even her lips were hid from him.  He bent towards her and put his hand
+over hers upon the sand.
+
+"Dear," he said humbly, "it seems so idle to say I love you, that I
+only dare to say it--as an excuse.  Will you let it stand at that, and
+forgive me just because of it?  You needn't tell me that I have no
+claim, and never had the least encouragement to speak of such a thing.
+I know that.  It's inconsiderate and presumptuous, and there's only me
+to blame.  But some day, perhaps, you won't mind remembering that I
+worshipped you, and try to be a little sorry for me after all."
+
+But what she tried, not over successfully, was to say his name.  Yet
+her lips proclaimed it with such a tremulous appropriation as to answer
+all his other questions.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+Maurice had never known an hour so disordered as that which followed
+his declaration.  His mind was like a locomotive factory trying at a
+moment's notice to make balloons.  It was a scene of astounding and
+fantastic compromises.
+
+The attitude for the occasion appeared to be a clear high joyousness
+tinged with the overwhelming sense of an unlooked-for favour.
+
+Something approaching that in appearance he did certainly achieve;
+enough to make for the girl the moment of its immense significance; to
+give it the acclamation, the splendour of crowning circumstance.
+
+His gladness, like the colour of a flag that suddenly dyes the air with
+victory, brought the strangest, the most assuring tumult to her heart.
+She heard it, as the beleaguered hear the guns that end their siege,
+too faint, too happy, too amazed to answer.
+
+He heard it with amazement too; heard in his own mouth the note of
+triumph, of a triumph which seemed to put an end to all his hopes, to
+mock with its thin pretence the lost promise of such a moment, the
+passionate exultation which it might have yielded him.
+
+Yet he heard it; that was something; and, though he hardly knew what he
+was saying, he could read its radiant answer upon the girl's face.  If
+he was missing the full measure of the hour--and that was to put his
+misfortune meagrely--she at least had not suspected it.  He had that
+single satisfaction--but, to his schooling, a supreme one--the
+reflection, as he voiced it to his trouble, that he was 'playing the
+game.'
+
+He was inspired to suggest tea.  They had brought it with them, and,
+though it might have seemed a higher compliment to forget both that and
+the hour, it was one that Maurice had not the pluck to pay.  He still
+felt to be an intruder to the occasion, to be sustaining what some one
+else had achieved.  The sense of duplicity made him clumsy as a man
+under a load; he could not use with a lover's audacity the exquisite
+immaturity of the moment.  The very kisses which her eyes expected left
+a traitor's taste upon his lips.
+
+Action, though it was but tea-making, gave him breathing space; it
+dismissed, for a while at least, the most protesting part of him from
+service into which so breathlessly it had been pressed.
+
+With a kettle in his hand, and under shelter of the hamper, his
+irresponsible buoyancy came back to him, his humorous appreciation of
+circumstance even when it told so heavily against himself; and his talk
+across the table he was spreading was only a shade too vivid to be a
+lover's.  Its gay note was thrown up by the girl's silence; a silence
+lightened only by a happy nod or smile.  She seemed to wish, sitting
+intently there, to feel her senses afloat on the invading flood of his
+devotion, as a boat is floated by the incoming tide.
+
+It was for that she sat so still, unwilling by any impulse of her own,
+to dilute her consciousness of this strange strong thing, which crept
+to her very skin and carried her away, surgingly intimate as the living
+sea.
+
+Maurice had set her silence down to shyness, till something in the soft
+rapture of her face told him its true meaning.  The pathos of that and,
+for him, the shame of it, hurt him as an air too rare to breathe.
+
+The thought of this woman measuring with grateful wonderment the
+magnitude of a thing which had no existence, but in which he had
+brought her to believe, wrung him with a keen distress.
+
+And in that sharp moment of shame and pity he came very near loving
+her; came near enough, at any rate, to dedicate the future to her
+illusion.
+
+As he knelt before her on the sand, offering her a tea-cup in both his
+hands as though it were some sacrifice to an idol, he realized, by the
+glance which accepted both the humour and the service, what a big thing
+he had in hand.  It was big enough even, so he found before long, to
+hide his own immense disappointment, which shrank into a small affair
+beside that which she must never be allowed to feel.
+
+He had received his discomfiture from a false trust in Fate, but hers
+would come from a false trust in him.
+
+So Maurice reflected as he watched Miss Nevern trying to persuade
+herself that cake on such an occasion was as easy to consume as cake on
+any other.  In that, however, despite an excellent intention, she did
+not succeed; and her failure, absurd as it might sound, lit in him a
+pride of responsibility which her "I love you" had not.  Here, at any
+rate, was an unequivocal effect; beyond evasion he was chargeable with
+this; and no priestly sacrament could have so pledged his allegiance as
+that little dryness of her throat.  She set down her half-emptied cup
+with the prettiest pretence of satiety, a pretence which Caragh, with
+the hot thirst of a wound upon him, and having already drained the
+tea-pot, felt it best became him to ignore.
+
+The wind, which had died at mid-day, freshened in the shadows of the
+September evening, and ruffled the flat face of the water into one rich
+dark hue.
+
+Along the northern shore of the bay the shade of the bluff had fallen,
+and made a leaden edging to the sea.
+
+Southward the low sun blazed, a dull rose-red, against the scarp of
+cliff, and turned the further waters and the dim head-lands beyond them
+to a wine-dipped purple.
+
+"It's as solemnly gorgeous as you could well have it," Maurice affirmed
+as he hauled in the boat, "and we're going out of this spiny harbour
+under all sail to show we take the display in a proper spirit."
+
+There was something so boyishly absurd in his determination, that
+Lettice, too numb with happiness to be determined about anything, went
+with a sigh of abdication into the bow, and leaning over the stem-post,
+with her fingers through the lower cringle in the luff, called the
+course with the quick decision of a river pilot.
+
+But for one long strident scrape--during which each held a
+breath--against a sunken ledge which the helmsman found her too close
+hauled to clear, they came valorously into the open sea, and Maurice,
+sitting over the gunwale to windward with the sheet in his hand,
+brought Lettice aft to steer.
+
+He had the position of vantage, for she sat a foot beneath him, and,
+unlike hers, his eyes owed no attention to the sail.
+
+She begged him not to look at her; but, feeling that observation was to
+her advantage, he only complied for a moment with her request.
+
+Observation was to his advantage too; for if, with shut eyes, it was
+easier to remember what he had lost in his new possession, with them
+open it was impossible to forget what he had gained.
+
+Only a dull man would have called Lettice Nevern beautiful, but the
+dullest could not have thought her plain.
+
+She had, in its most dainty shape, that perfect imperfection known as
+prettiness.  Distractingly pretty, most women called her; and men who
+were not thought easy of distraction had justified the label.  She had
+a figure a sculptor would have prized, full, buoyant, flexible, with
+the grace of splendid health in every line.  It was a consolation,
+Maurice reflected, to be able to admire an acquisition, even though one
+did not desire it.  She had, too, an admirable temper, an eye for what
+became her, a dozen interests in the open air.  That made for mutual
+accommodation, and he could imagine nothing in her which could lessen
+his respect.
+
+His ignorance of women was based on too wide an acquaintance to be
+neglected, yet he felt sure that Lettice was no coquette.
+
+And despite the gaiety with which her face was so charmingly inscribed,
+she could endure quietness--enjoy it even, as four summers at Ballindra
+proved.
+
+On the whole he felt cause to thank Providence, as a man might, able to
+nurse his damaged limbs after an accident, that the catastrophe was,
+for him, no worse.
+
+He was beginning to wonder what it might be for her.
+
+They raced home under more canvas than one who knew the shore winds of
+Ballindra would have cared to carry; but neither, for diverse reasons,
+was inclined to prudence, and the wake they blazed across that
+blue-black surface was a joy to see.
+
+Caragh's right hand went to and fro, as though it held a bolting horse,
+and the sheet wore a deep red furrow about his palm.
+
+Lettice kept her eyes on her work, for, as they felt the tide-race, it
+took some little coaxing through the stiffer gusts to hold the boat's
+nose on the Head in front of them.
+
+The wind that swept the sea was channelled by the contour of the cliffs
+into blustering draughts that streamed from the deep cut coombes, with
+spaces almost of calm between them.  Slantwise across these lay their
+course, and as the boat leapt, like a hurt thing, at each fresh blow,
+Maurice could feel the quick restraint of the girl's guiding fingers.
+
+As his arm gave with the gust, the pressure of hers upon the tiller
+seemed to answer it, and that sensation of swift divination and subtle
+responsiveness between his hand and hers was worth the risk of an
+upset, and Maurice only wished it were less impossible to discover if
+Miss Nevern shared it.  He supposed not.  Women, so time had taught
+him, were seldom sensitive to the unexpected.
+
+As they cleared the Head, and the mystery of the river lay in the dark
+hills before them, Caragh came again to his senses.
+
+"Down helm!" he said.
+
+She woke out of her reverie, but with her hand hard over.
+
+"What are you going to do?" she asked.
+
+"Shorten sail," he said, letting go the halyards.
+
+"You're very cautious," she flouted.
+
+"It's the timidity of sudden happiness," he smiled, making fast the
+first reef cringle to the boom; "you've given me too much to lose."
+
+She touched for an instant the hand which clipped the leech beside her,
+and the print of her warm fingers came like an oath for sanctity,
+turning to truth what had had for his own ear but a jesting bitterness:
+she had given him too much to lose.
+
+"Well!" he laughed, when they were going again, as the full draught of
+the river laid them over, and, ahead, the orange lights of Ballindra
+gleamed in the cleft purple of the land, "would you like that tuck out
+of her skirts?"
+
+She set her lips, as they shaved the outmost ledges of the southern
+shore, and came about in the banging wind.
+
+"You ought to row," she said, smiling.
+
+"Not a doubt of it," he admitted blandly; "you've only to say the word."
+
+But she did not.  Though the harbour was not full, there were riding
+lights enough upon the water to make, in that dusk, the threading of
+their way exciting, even without the tide under them, which hummed and
+jumped against the quivering anchor-chains.  But she was proud of her
+seamanship, and of her knowledge of the river, and conscious that the
+man who watched her could appreciate the skill in every turn of her
+wrist, and the pluck which kept it steady as they grazed the great
+black shapes of ships, or spun about as a straining cable snapped up at
+them out of the dark water.
+
+Tim Moran, the old boatman who put them ashore, had a melancholy
+headshake at her rashness.
+
+"Bedad, sor, it's not meself that larned her to be so vinturesome!" he
+explained apologetically to Caragh as he pocketed an unlooked-for piece
+of silver at the slip.
+
+"She's a wilful little thing, I'm afraid," Maurice murmured, slipping
+his arm in hers, as they went up into the obscurity of the shore, "and
+rather given to running risks in the dark."
+
+She gave him her face for answer; and the kiss he put upon it was her
+seal of safety in the darkest risk that she had run.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+It was that risk, a risk of which she guessed so little, which
+overshadowed the three days which had been added to Caragh's sojourn at
+Ballindra, and which settled, black and heavy, on his reflections when
+she waved him a farewell.
+
+Lettice had driven him the bleak ten miles to the dreary little station
+which lay like a great gray stone upon the stony fields, and he had
+resigned himself to eight hours of Irish travel and his thoughts,
+doubting of which he would be the rather rid.
+
+The announcement of a man's affection for a woman is regarded, to-day
+at least, dynamically.  It is supposed to put things in motion; and it
+is left, very reasonably, for the man to explain what.
+
+Maurice recognized the obligation; but he asked a breathing space in
+which to adjust the machinery.  There was a good deal to be arranged,
+he said.  There was considerably more than could be told a bride.  His
+affairs, he explained, entangled by the provisions of his father's
+will, were beginning to adjust themselves.  But his income for the
+present was provisional, and till certain securities had been realized
+and charges paid--things which could not be hurried--he would hardly
+know how he stood, not definitely enough, at any rate, to speak of
+settlements.
+
+Lettice made a mouth at that.
+
+"I know," he said, as he softened its displeasure, "but there's your
+brother!"--he was her guardian and the sole trustee of her small
+possessions.  "I can take a shot at his first question."
+
+"Oh, so can I," she sighed.  "But when will you be able to answer it?"
+
+"Say in six months," he suggested.  "Can you have all that patience?"
+
+She nodded, and so, quite honestly, Caragh obtained his respite; though
+the arrangements for which he needed it were not entirely financial.
+
+It was, curiously enough, the very honesty of the transaction which
+troubled his Celtic mind as he travelled eastward.
+
+Since he had to hide from her the real necessity for postponement, he
+would have preferred to hide it behind the responsible audacity of a
+lie; behind something for which he could feel manfully and contritely
+accountable.
+
+Deception was least endurable which did not compromise the deceiver.
+He hated the hedging truth.
+
+He hated more things that morning than he often took the trouble even
+to think about, and they were mostly phases of himself.  He was
+conscious too, as the train rolled across the weary strapwork of
+stonewalled fields, of a new sensation.  He felt to have left a part of
+himself in Ballindra, fastened there securely, yet tied to him still by
+a thread that seemed drawn out of him, as the weaving filament from a
+spider's body, which, far or fast as he might travel, he could not
+break.  It would hold him and bring him back.
+
+The part which he had left there was the pledge he had given, the word
+of his honour; a word which had been a lie at best: yet no true oath
+that he had ever sworn had seemed to have half its sanctity.  It was
+her belief that made it sacred and more binding than the truth.
+
+The proud way she wore this mock jewel, as though it were a priceless
+stone, shut for ever the giver's lips upon its value.
+
+If he had once loved her he might have faced her without disgrace in
+the day his love had died, but there was no grace left him now but his
+deception.  That, henceforth, was to be the high thing, the stimulating
+fineness of his life; and, curiously enough, it woke in him a
+determination, manful and tender, which no real passion of the past had
+been able to arouse.
+
+It woke too, though from less tranquil slumbers, the remembrance of his
+mutations, the grieved conviction of instability.  He, least of all
+men, should furnish a socket for the lamp of constancy.  Of what
+impression, he asked himself mournfully, had he ever kept the print.
+It was odious, contemptible.  He was sick of his inconstancy; it took
+the exalting seriousness from life.
+
+But though for his fickleness he blamed no one but himself, he realized
+that it had been aided by his somewhat unfortunate predilections.  None
+of the women whose fascination he had acknowledged could be considered
+an inspiration to stability.  The very colour of their charm had a
+chameleon quality and his appreciation was, too often, for its
+susceptive changes.
+
+Yet, had he met, so at least he told himself, some sober-sweet demand
+upon his constancy, he believed that, in conduct at any rate, he could
+have sustained it.
+
+Well, the demand had now been made, and if he had not faced it with any
+furious gratitude, here was in him a humble determination to realize
+for one woman at least her conception of a man.  That resolve had
+stiffened him into something approaching a romantic attitude on that
+fairy beach in the first shock of his unlooked-for conquest, and it
+sustained him now, more or less, while during the slow dull journey he
+reflected soberly as a conqueror on the administration of his new
+possession.
+
+There was a good deal to be thought of; a good deal about him that
+would have to go.  Economies to be effected, not in expenditure
+only--that was a small matter--but in life.  And in life it had pleased
+him hitherto to be just a little extravagant.  He had wasted it
+generously, for others as heedlessly as for himself.  He had done
+nothing, as he was so often, so importantly reminded; but then, in a
+happier sense, he had done everything.
+
+Done it with a simplicity, a gaiety, a frugality even; since, after
+all, it was the evanescent, the immaterial things he cared for; the
+goods that are never marked in plain figures and only paid for in life.
+
+Well, there would be an end to that sort of payment, save such as went
+into his wife's pocket.  She seemed, poor pretty thing, to swell and
+spread, ogreishly, between him and--if he must confess it--his most
+alluring interests.
+
+Her warding arms shut out the enchantment of all the charming women in
+the world.
+
+Truly, he reflected, in the matter of a woman's value, the man who,
+with an income just sufficient for himself, sought her hand in
+marriage, must seem the most determined optimist under the sun.
+
+Yet he felt anything but an optimist when the darkness of the night
+gave place to white clouds of steam above the rocking oily blackness of
+harbour water, and he dragged himself stiff and tired from his ill-lit
+carriage into the blanching glare of Kingston jetty.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Caragh found at his rooms, when he arrived in London, in the forefront
+of his correspondence, a letter and a telegram.
+
+Both were from Lady Ethel Vernon, and had an appositeness with which
+their recipient could very readily have dispensed.
+
+They had been propped against a photograph of the sender, a coincidence
+not remarkable considering the number of her likenesses which the room
+held.
+
+These agreed in the presentment of a woman, dark and slight, with a
+finely carried head, deep eyes that might be passionate, and a mouth
+that knew something of disdain.
+
+Caragh took up one of the portraits when he had read his letter, looked
+at it along while without expression, and set it down again.  The
+letter, which bore a foreign postmark and was some days old, spoke to
+the writer's probable departure with her husband for Budapest, where
+the latter, who had been an under secretary, wished to study some
+question of religious politics which was to come before the House of
+Deputies.
+
+It groaned at the necessity of such a sojourn at such a season, and
+suggested, if a hint so imperious could be called suggestion, that
+Maurice Caragh's presence might be required in the Hungarian capital.
+The telegram merely added that it was.
+
+Caragh picked up an English Bradshaw, and after turning its pages
+absently for five minutes in search of continental routes, realized the
+inadequacy of the volume, took up his hat, and went out.
+
+Piccadilly dozed in the September sun, with a strange air of tired
+quietness, inert and listless as a weary being.
+
+A stale warm haze of sunlight filled the air, silent, unstirred, that
+made a misty thickness in the plumage of the trees, while from some
+by-street were blown pale vapours with the smoky reek of bitumen, which
+told of autumn's leisurely repairs.
+
+The dust on the roadway rose about the spray of a water-cart, and
+beyond it rumbled a solitary bus.  On the park-stand waited,
+driverless, a worn four-wheeler, its horse asleep; and, here and there
+along the forsaken pavement, desultory figures, which the season never
+saw there, came and went.
+
+Caragh, on the doorstep of his club, inhaled gratefully the dormant
+air, which sank like an opiate into the senses.  How happy if those for
+whose pleasure this highway rang, worn and sleepless, during the hours
+of June, could only imitate in their recessions the soothing
+passiveness of its repose.
+
+But the reflection led him to the banks of the Danube, and so, by the
+Orient express, indoors.  There he lunched, looked out his train,
+worked through his letters, and went out into the dozing afternoon.
+
+If he had ever been before in London during its first September days he
+felt he had been there to no purpose.  He had missed it all.  The
+silence, the sense of space, the strange exhausted air, the curious
+people moving aimlessly about, like the queer creatures that sometimes
+take possession of a deserted warren.
+
+He strolled vaguely through the deserted streets, out of which suddenly
+the inhabitants had sunk as water through a sieve.  A housemaid's
+laughing challenge from a doorway to the grocer's boy rang round an
+empty square.  A lean cat went softly along the pavement, yet one could
+hear the fall of her pads.  Everywhere blinds were drawn behind the
+windows.  The place was in mourning for a people that died annually,
+like seedling flowers.
+
+Caragh drifted from street to street, amused, philosophic, in that
+oblivion to his own before and after of which he was so profusely
+capable.
+
+When he was tired he returned to the club.  Then he remembered; and,
+after deciding regretfully against the adequateness of a telegram,
+wrote four pages of penitent affection, which he hoped might read more
+exhilarating in Ballindra than he could pretend to find them.
+
+With their execution his consciousness quickened, and he spent a
+melancholy evening at the play.  Two days later he was in Vienna.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+"Here!" cried Harry Vernon, tossing his wife a telegram he had just
+opened, "this is meant for you.  Caragh's coming on from Komarom by
+raft."
+
+"By _raft_?" exclaimed the lady as she caught the envelope.  "What's
+that?"
+
+"One of those crawling timber things you see going by," replied Vernon,
+gazing meditatively across the river; "it's rather the sort of thing
+one imagines Caragh would do: invests him with the charm of the
+unexpected."
+
+His wife was frowning as she read the message.
+
+"What does he mean by such a piece of fooling," she said petulantly,
+"when he knows I'm here alone!"
+
+"Never having been married, he probably thinks there's me," suggested
+her husband blandly.
+
+"Well, there's you and about twenty ill-dressed Germans who can't even
+speak their own language, or no one; mostly no one.  It's not amusing
+in a place like this.  When will he be here?"
+
+Harry Vernon put his finger on the bell.  "We'll find out," he said.
+
+But they did not.  The combined intelligence of the hotel was unequal
+to coping with the ways of a timber raft; it made obliging guesses,
+tranquilly ridiculous, as a concession to good manners, which, with
+easy indifference to distance, endowed Caragh's new mode of motion with
+any rate of progress between that of a perambulator and of an express
+train.
+
+Ethel Vernon bit her lip as her husband drew out, with huge relish, in
+his profuse execrable German the ambagious ignorance of the hotel staff.
+
+"Well," he laughed, as the last witness withdrew, "it seems you may
+expect Caragh any moment from lunch-time until this day month.  If only
+these good people had named an hour at which he couldn't possibly turn
+up we should have known when to look for him."
+
+"He may come when he pleases," said his wife indifferently.
+
+"It's a way he has," remarked the other, smiling.
+
+Lady Ethel determined before his arrival to see everything in the city
+which Caragh might wish to show her.
+
+The effort would bore her considerably, but she hoped for some
+compensation from his chagrin.  The city was, however, for the
+following days, almost obliterated by pelting rain.
+
+But even that brought a measure of consolation.  Ethel sat at her
+window, and watched the green river grow turbid and swollen under the
+streaming skies.
+
+"I hope he likes his raft," she murmured grimly.
+
+But it was her husband who on that aspiration had the first news.  He
+had paid a visit to Vacz, and meant to return by water.  On the pier he
+found Caragh, whose curiosity in raft travel was satisfied, and who
+yearned for dry clothes.  They travelled by the same boat, and Maurice
+explained that his adventure dated back many years in design, which a
+chance meeting with a timber merchant at Gyor enabled him to execute.
+He gave an account of the raft-men, their hardihood, humour, and
+riparian morality.
+
+"I see," said Vernon, amused and interested.  "Pity it's not the sort
+of thing that appeals to a woman!"
+
+Caragh looked at him doubtfully.
+
+"I suppose it's not," he said.
+
+"I mean as a reason for having kept her waiting," Vernon continued.
+
+"Must think of something else," soliloquized the other dolefully.
+
+Vernon laughed.
+
+"There's always that happy alternative for a Celt.  Oh, by the way," he
+cried, with sudden remembrance, "how's the lady?"
+
+"Which lady?" Caragh enquired.
+
+"The lady you're going to marry in that green isle of yours.  We heard
+of her from Miss Persse, who'd been staying over there, at
+Bally--something or other."
+
+"Miss Nevern?" Caragh suggested absently, looking across the river; he
+was not a man very easy to surprise.
+
+"That's the name!" said Vernon.  "When does it come off?"
+
+"I'm afraid you'll have to ask Miss Persse," replied the other slowly;
+"I'm not in her confidence."
+
+"Well, I'm sorry," the politician said.  "I hoped you were going to
+settle down and lead an honest life."
+
+"I've kept out of prison--and Parliament, so far," replied Caragh
+thoughtfully.
+
+"Your things turned up all right, and I took a room for them," Vernon
+explained, as they landed at the Ferencz Jozsef Quay and went up to the
+hotel.  "The place is so full over this religious Bill that it's hard
+to get in anywhere."
+
+He went up with Caragh to see if the right room had been reserved.
+
+"We're dining down below at seven; everything's early here.  Kapitany
+is coming, the leader of the opposition in the Magnates."
+
+Caragh got out of his wet things in which he had lived during the two
+days of rain, took a bath, and dressed.  There were still two hours to
+dinner, and he debated for a moment if he should go in search of Ethel
+Vernon.  Something in his remembrance of her husband's smile, however,
+seemed to deprecate hurry, and he was aware that the man who knew not
+how to wait came only to the things he had not wanted.
+
+As he doubted what to do, he remembered vividly where he was.  While he
+loitered, under an apricot twilight the Váczi-utcza was becoming
+silvered with its thousand lamps.
+
+At that hour the brilliant merry little street would be filling,
+between its walls of blazing windows, across the breadth of its
+asphalte road, with a stream of men and women; men of fine carriage and
+women with splendid eyes; laughing, chattering, flaunting, flirting,
+strolling idly to and fro.
+
+He would sit there again, as he had sat so often, to sip his coffee and
+watch the crowd.
+
+On his way a postman, running into him, gave a fresh jolt to his memory.
+
+There would be a letter awaiting him from Lettice!  He paused a moment,
+mentally to locate the post-office, and to taste the curious sedate
+pleasure the anticipation brought.  It was the first letter he had
+received from her, and the first of such a kind that had ever come to
+him from any woman.  He found it in the big busy building behind the
+Laktanya, and, slipping it into his pocket, turned back to the gay
+Váczi-utcza, already filled with a piercing ineffectual whiteness under
+the clear rose and amethyst of the evening sky.
+
+There, with a green tumbler before him, in a kavehaz much patronized of
+the garrison, he sat and read his letter, looking out absently between
+its sentences at the lighted faces in the street.
+
+It was a shy sweet formal little note, not lavish of endearment, less
+so even than her lips had been, and with something evasive and
+unaccustomed about it which touched Caragh, like the shrinking of a
+child's hand from an unfamiliar texture.
+
+He had completely forgotten her existence half an hour earlier, yet he
+was surprised to find how tenderly he thought of her, when he thought
+of her at all.  Women, before now, had often filled his thoughts to an
+aching tension; he had read their letters with a leaping pulse; but he
+had felt for none of them as he did for this frank girl, who escaped so
+easily from his remembrance and had never warmed his blood.
+
+He bought a basket of saffron roses on his way back and sent it up to
+Ethel Vernon.  She was sitting at table when he came down to dinner,
+talking volubly across it to a ruddy white-haired old gentleman with a
+soldier's face and shoulders.  She greeted him with charming animation,
+introduced him to Kapitany, mentioned his adventure, and wove his
+tongue at once into their talk.  Fine manners and the tact of
+entertainment were traditions in her family since there had been an
+earldom of Dalguise, and the famous Hungarian, noting the adroitness
+with which she piloted Caragh's ethical opinions into the traffic of
+politics, thought her a very clever woman, and him a very fortunate
+young man.
+
+With his own good fortune Caragh was less impressed.  He had not
+expected that his roses would be worn, but he wished that a frock had
+not been selected which seemed so much to miss them.
+
+He knew Ethel Vernon well enough to make out the meaning of her
+primrose and heliotrope, and she, alas! knew him well enough to be
+certain that he could not miss it.  The delicacy of his perception had
+supplied her before with forms of punishment, which she used on him the
+more deliberately since no one else of her acquaintance was hurt by
+them at all.  Her courtesy, which so appealed to Kapitany, seemed to
+Caragh like a frozen forceps feeling for his nerves.  They were both of
+them beyond the use of courtesies, which may lead back along the road
+of friendship as far, and faster, than they have led forward.  Her
+affability seemed that night to thrust Caragh back to the days spent in
+fascinated speculation on the advice in Ethel Vernon's eyes.  He had
+taken it, or supposed he had taken it, in the end, and for nearly three
+years now she had stood for everything of woman's interest and
+adjustment in his life.  That, for him, was a considerable stretch of
+constancy, for which however he took no credit.  It was due, as he had
+once suggested, to her bewildering inconstancy to herself, which
+produced in her captive a sense of attachment to half a dozen women.
+
+Her inconstancy in those three years had not, it was true, been
+confined altogether to herself.  She had forsaken her own high places
+more than once or twice to follow strange gods.  There were certain
+astounding admirations to her account for men whom Caragh found
+intolerable.
+
+She found them so herself after a brief experience, and always returned
+to him more charming for her mistakes, with the wry face of a child who
+comes from some unprofitable misdemeanour to be scolded and consoled.
+
+So, with mutual concessions and disillusionment, their alliance--never
+worse than indiscreet--took the shape of a serene affection.  On her
+part somewhat appropriative, and touched perhaps on his with sentiment;
+yet, in the main, that rare arrangement between man and woman, a loyal
+and tender comradeship.
+
+Caragh had, in consequence, cause to feel embarrassed by the news he
+carried.
+
+Projects for his marriage had often made a jest between them, but
+neither had ever taken the idea seriously, and its development would
+come to her, as he knew, with all the baseness of a betrayal.
+
+His sense of the cruelty of what he had to tell her endued him with a
+strange numbness and indifference to the fashion in which during dinner
+her hurt pride stabbed at him under the caresses of her manner.  Beside
+her just resentment, this irritation because he had dared to keep her
+waiting seemed not to matter.  He was so sorry for all she was to
+suffer because of him, that no lesser feeling seemed to count.  He
+listened to Vernon's politics, to Kapitany's eulogy of _fogash_, but he
+was thinking only of what he had to say.
+
+After dinner the Hungarian carried Vernon off to the club, and his
+hostess offered to keep Caragh until her husband's return.
+
+He followed her upstairs to her sitting-room, and out on to a little
+balcony which overlooked the Danube.
+
+The night had in it still the soft warmth of the September day, but the
+sky was dyed with violet, in which the stars were growing white.  The
+river swept beneath them in a leaden humming flood, and beyond it the
+Castle and Hill of Buda stood black among the stars.
+
+Ethel dropped into a low cane chair, and Caragh, seated upon the
+balustrade, took a long look at the darkening air before he turned and
+spoke to her.
+
+He knew that an explanation was expected of him, reasonable, but not so
+reasonable as to evade reproaches; and an apology, not humble enough to
+be beneath reproof.  He tendered both; and if they left his censor with
+quite false impressions, that, he reflected ruefully, came of the
+perverse requirements of a woman's mind.
+
+Looking down at her lifted face below him, pale under the purple heaven
+as though penetrated by the night, and still estranged, despite his
+pleading, over so trumpery a cause, he wondered how much, because of
+her beauty, woman had lost in understanding.
+
+Beauty Ethel Vernon had in its most provoking, most illusive form.  It
+came and went like the scent of a flower, left her passive and
+unpersuading, or lit her radiantly as a kindled lamp.
+
+Even the shape of her spread skirts in the chair beneath him had in its
+vagueness something, some soft glow of sense, which made it expressive,
+and which made it hers.  And he was anxious for peace, for peace at any
+price, from such a needless strife.  What he had to tell her would be
+hard enough any way; but it was, at all events, something with the
+dignity of fate.  He could not speak of it while fighting this little
+foolish fit of outraged pride, and he would not speak of it while his
+tidings might seem to be touched with the malice of his punishment.
+For one moment he was tempted to let this idle quarrel grow into a
+cause of rupture--so easy with an offended woman--and thus be spared
+speech at all.  It would be easier, more considerate for her,
+inclination told him, and ah! so acceptably easier and more considerate
+for himself.  But the temptation was not for long.  In all his
+unprofitable vacillations he had shirked nothing to which he had set
+his name.  The only chance to get square with folly was, he knew, by
+paying the price of it, and the one gain possible in this worst of his
+blunders seemed to be its pain.  He would go through with that.
+
+Yet, though he had his chance that evening, had it thrust upon him, he
+did not take it.  There is a limit even to one's appetite for pain.
+
+But he made peace, having swallowed his scolding and admitted that the
+ways of men were mad.  The talk turned to easier topics, and he looked
+with less apprehension at the silken shadow in the chair.
+
+Then, with a sudden air of remembrance, Ethel put the question which
+had clung for hours to the end of her tongue.
+
+"Oh! by the way, am I to congratulate you?"
+
+"Well, I don't know," he said.  "About what?"
+
+"Oh, that's absurd!" she exclaimed with a nervous laugh: "Isn't there a
+Miss Nevin?"
+
+"Two or three, I daresay," he conceded.
+
+"Miss Persse only mentioned one," she said, looking keenly at the dark
+silhouette of his figure perched on the iron trellis among the stars.
+"But she wrote that you could tell us a good deal about _her_."
+
+"I can," he allowed serenely; "she's a charming creature."
+
+"Sufficiently charming to be charmed by you?"
+
+"So I flatter myself," he said.  "I don't know even that I wouldn't put
+it--to be charmed _only_ by me."
+
+"Ah, that's too superlative," she sighed derisively.
+
+"To be said of any woman?  Possibly!  You're a woman and you ought to
+know," he reflected.  "But she's the sort of woman one says rather more
+of than one ought."
+
+"And rather more to than one ought."
+
+"Well, yes, perhaps.  One forgets, of course; but I fancy I must have
+said a good deal."
+
+"She could listen to a good deal, no doubt," said Ethel Vernon slowly.
+
+"She could listen absorbingly," he replied with ardour.
+
+"And you said all you knew?"
+
+"Heaven pity a poor woman! no!  You forget my attainments.  I said all
+that I was hopelessly ignorant of.  That proved infinitely more
+attractive."
+
+"I daresay it did," she agreed shortly.  "Your ignorance of what you
+shouldn't say to a woman is past belief."
+
+"I don't think it passed hers," he said pensively.  "She hasn't your
+capacity for distrust."
+
+"She'll acquire it," returned the other drily.  "And what do you do in
+that sort of place?  I heard you sailed with her."
+
+"I sailed with her, I sat with her, I supped with her!  The brother was
+obligingly occupied, and preoccupied, with the estate--which yields
+about half what it costs him--and so she had to look after me."
+
+"Which wasn't difficult?"
+
+"Simplicity itself," he smiled.  "She had to look such a very little
+way; I was never out of her sight."
+
+"Idyllic!"
+
+"It was.  We sailed from the hour the mists lifted till the moon rose
+to show us home.  Or we sat together on little beaches with only the
+wide seas in sight."
+
+"Where she made love to you?"
+
+"Where she made love to me.  On a strand of fairy shells, with a
+sapphire pool beside us and her little arm about my neck."
+
+Ethel Vernon laughed.  "You're about the only man I know who would have
+told her to remove it."
+
+"I didn't tell her to remove it.  I abandoned myself to the situation.
+You didn't ask, by the way, if she were pretty."
+
+"No, I heard that you had stayed there for a fortnight."
+
+Caragh chuckled.  "A very sage deduction," he replied.  "Well, she is
+pretty, though you mightn't think so.  It's the sort of prettiness that
+tempts you in."
+
+"That tempts you in?" she questioned irritably.
+
+"Yes, tempts you in to the character.  Like a lamp by the window of a
+cosy room.  Makes you want to go in, and loll in a chair, and look at
+the pictures--there are pictures--and feel comfortably and gratefully
+at home.  There's a kind of beauty, you know, to which one says, 'Yes,
+very charming; but, for heaven's sake, let's stay outside!'"
+
+"But you didn't stay outside Miss Nevin's?" Ethel Vernon asked.
+
+"Miss Nevern's," he corrected.  "No, as I've told you, I went in, and
+walked round, and wondered how she had kept it so unspoiled.  Most
+girls' minds are pasted over with appalling chromos of the emotions, as
+painted in fiction; and there's a stale taint of some one else's
+experience in everything they do and say; a precocious air of having
+been vicariously there before.  It's quite stimulating to come across a
+woman who is fresh to what she feels."
+
+"Like the beautiful Miss Nevern!  And how did it end?"
+
+"Oh, how _does_ it end?" he said with a sigh.  "We vowed the endless
+everythings, and kissed, and parted.  And here I am in Budapest!"
+
+The lady in the chair looked up at him for some seconds with a slow
+smile upon her lips.  "I wonder when you're going to be too old," she
+murmured, "to talk nonsense?"
+
+"Oh, it wasn't nonsense," he answered mournfully.
+
+She began some question as to his journey, but he checked it with a
+lifted finger and a sudden "Hush!"
+
+She could only hear the dull rush of the river and the waning rumble of
+the town.  Then above these floated, blown soft and faint as a
+thistle-seed against their faces, a bugle note from the black Castle of
+Buda across the stream.
+
+A wailing cadence, twice repeated, and then the long melancholy call,
+with all its intricate phrases delicately clear, now that their ears
+were adjusted to the thread of sound, ending as it had opened with the
+falling cadence which left a last low mournful note upon the air.
+
+"What is it?" she enquired as the sound faded.
+
+"Last Post," he answered.  "Wait!"
+
+The gurgle of the river rose again, and the feebler murmur of the
+streets rejoined it.  Then the call came once more; came with buoyant
+clearness through the blue night air, straight across the water.
+
+The noises of the city seemed to cease, as though all stood listening
+to that fluting sweetness, and, when its last plaintive challenge died
+away, the slender echoes of other bugles could be heard repeating it to
+the distant barracks beyond the hill.
+
+Long after the last was silent Caragh still stared out over the river
+at the girdle of lights along its further shore and the scattered
+tapers which burned beyond it up the Castle slope into the sky.
+
+"That seems to impress you very much," said Ethel Vernon presently.
+
+"It does impress me," he replied.  "It doesn't seem to belong there."
+
+He did not say why.  It was seldom worth while to submit to a woman any
+sentiment that was unestablished.  Convention was the passport to her
+understanding.  But what, he wondered, had soldiers in common with that
+cry of the spent day?  How were their blatant showy lives related to
+the impotent patience of its despair?  It was as if some noisy
+roisterer had breathed a Nunc Dimittis.
+
+But he only explained, when she pressed for his reason, that the call
+did not sound to him sufficiently truculent for a soldier's good-night.
+
+He whistled its English equivalent.  "That's more like it," he
+exclaimed.  "The man who sleeps on that will sleep too deep to dream of
+anything but love, and blood, and beer."
+
+They talked on under the stars till Harry Vernon stumbled out on to the
+balcony from the darkness of the room, and began at once an energetic
+account of his evening at the Casino.  He never consulted the interest
+of his hearers, but his voluble information generally made his interest
+theirs.  He was to inspect, on the morrow, more than most men would
+have cared to look at in a week, and he was certain to see it all with
+the weighty sense of responsibility to his country which only an under
+secretary can acquire.  He apologized to his wife for leaving her
+introduction to the city with one as incompetent as Caragh to do it
+justice.
+
+"He probably knows it a great deal better than you ever will," she
+laughed.
+
+"He probably does," replied her husband with a grin, "but the parts he
+knows best he won't be able to show you."
+
+Caragh threw a cushion at the speaker's head as he turned to say
+good-night to his wife.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+He went downstairs, and out on to the quay, turning southward along the
+river towards the Fövámház.
+
+For a foreigner he knew Pest well, but his knowledge only led him now
+by its loneliest avenue.  He stood for a long while, his back to the
+empty market-place--which glowed by day with the red and orange of
+autumn ripeness--his elbows on the broad stone embankment, gazing out
+across the swirling river on which the starlight slid and shivered in
+darting streaks of gold.
+
+He hated himself for what had taken place that evening, as he had often
+with equal reason hated himself before.
+
+Somehow he seemed to lack the personal seriousness which saved men from
+treating their own affairs with the humorous tolerance which they
+extended to their neighbours!  Life appeared to him the same comic
+spectacle from whatever point one saw it.  Fate was often just as funny
+when it killed as when it crowned you, and however intimately they
+might annoy him, he never could keep back a laugh at its queer ways.
+
+It was Fate's whim at present to make him look like a scoundrel by a
+deed that was probably as decent as any he would ever do, and the irony
+of his ill-luck so tickled him that, in laughing at it, he had become
+really abominable.
+
+A sentimentalist with a sense of humour cut, as he could see, a very
+poor figure; it were better, so far as appearances went, to be a
+pompous fool.
+
+Self-esteem is so widespread a virtue that the world, whatever it may
+say, is always impressed even by ridiculous dignity, and its one
+universally unconvincing spectacle is the man laughing at himself.
+Besides, when a man finds himself absurd, what is he likely to think
+imposing?
+
+Yet, for all his humour, Caragh sighed.  For the moment, as on many
+previous moments, he craved the solemn personal point of view to make
+life seem for once of some importance and give him a taste of undiluted
+tears.
+
+His reflections were interrupted by something rubbing against his leg.
+
+It proved to be a little white dog, and he addressed some whimsical
+advice to it about the time of night before looking out again upon the
+river.  But as the animal made no sign of movement, but merely shivered
+against his ankle, he lifted it up and set it on the parapet before him.
+
+From an inspection there he found it to be all but starved, with just
+strength enough to stand.
+
+He was indifferent to dogs, and felt that the wisest course, as he
+explained to it, would be to drop the trembling creature into the water
+and out of a world that had used it so ill.
+
+But he was very far from indifferent to the waif-like loneliness that
+gazed at him from its eyes, and, tucking it resignedly under his wrap,
+he turned back to the hotel.
+
+He spent an hour there, feeding it with some biscuits that remained
+from his raft journey, soaked in whisky and water, and then, since the
+little thing refused to rest but on the bed, he made the best of its
+odorous presence beside him, and only cursed his own soft-heartedness
+when waked occasionally by its tongue.
+
+On the morrow he began to show Ethel Vernon the city, and for two days
+she was too interested and fatigued to find fault with him.  She had
+discovered the terrier, and enthusiastically adopted it, to Caragh's
+relief, being as devoted to dogs as he was apathetic.
+
+But on the third evening, when they were sitting again together upon
+the balcony after a quiet afternoon, she spoke her disappointment.
+
+The night was as splendidly blue as it had been when they sat there
+before; and she, dressed in black, with blue-black sequins woven over
+her bodice and scattered upon her skirt, looked to be robed in some
+dark cluster of starlight in her corner of the balcony.
+
+They had been talking of matters in which neither took much interest;
+then after a long pause she said quietly, "Why are you so different?"
+
+"I?" he exclaimed.
+
+"Oh, please don't pretend," she sighed.  "What is it?"
+
+"I told you," he said doggedly, "the other night."
+
+"The other night?" she repeated.  "What, when we were here?"
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+She reflected for a moment.  "About that girl, the one in Ireland?  Do
+you mean that?"
+
+"I do," he said.
+
+"Do you mean it was true?" she asked with increasing tenseness.
+
+"Quite true," he said.
+
+"But you were laughing," she protested incredulously.  "I took it for a
+joke."
+
+"I'm always laughing," he said grimly; "but I wish I hadn't been then.
+It was so serious that I couldn't be.  But it's no good explaining
+that; you can't understand."
+
+Her mind was set on something different--on something to her of more
+moment than a man's absurd reasons for being trivial.  It was some time
+before she spoke.
+
+"You asked her to marry you?" she pondered slowly, only half in
+question, as though scarcely able to realize what he had done.
+
+"I did," he said; "how else should we be engaged?"
+
+"Oh, dozens of ways," she answered: "she might have asked you."
+
+"Well, she didn't," he said stoutly.
+
+"I wonder if you know," she mused; "men don't.  And did you want to
+marry her?"
+
+"Would I have asked her otherwise?" he demanded.
+
+"Oh, yes," she sighed; "very possibly.  Men often propose because they
+can think of nothing else to say.  And have you wanted to be married
+long?"
+
+"What do you mean?" he said.
+
+"Three months?" she queried.
+
+The light little head was tilted sideways in old fascinating way.  It
+was not so dark but he might have seen it had he not been staring at
+the stars.  He might even have noticed, had he looked closer, how wide
+her eyes were, and how unsteady the small mouth.
+
+"Why three months?" he said.
+
+"Wasn't it three months ago we were at Bramley Park?" she went on
+reflectively.  "Can you still remember what you told me there?"
+
+"Was it different from what I'd told you everywhere?" he parried.
+
+"No--o!" she murmured, with a long wavering breath; "not until
+to-night.  You said you could never, while I lived, think of marrying
+another woman."
+
+"Yes," he assented; "I remember.  We were looking down at the moonlight
+on the lake."
+
+"We were," she said.  "And you had your hand on mine.  You put it
+there; you put it there as you spoke.  Were you thinking how
+wonderfully easy it was to fool a woman?"
+
+"I've never fooled you, nor tried to fool you," he answered quietly.
+"I've cared for you too much for that.  No, not in the common way; but
+because you've always been such an honest and good friend to me.  Some
+women insist on being fooled; they make any sort of truth to them
+impossible.  You made a lie."
+
+"So it seems now," she said wistfully.
+
+"No," he replied, "it seems now just the opposite.  But I can't help
+that."
+
+"You could have helped it ... once," she said.
+
+"Oh, we can always help things once," he objected.
+
+"Did you know her when we were at Bramley?"
+
+"Yes, very slightly."
+
+"Very slightly, only three months ago," she repeated incredulously.
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+There was a pause.  Ethel Vernon's fingers were playing nervously with
+a ring.
+
+"When did you want to marry her?" she asked at length.
+
+He hesitated in his turn.
+
+"I can't tell you that," he said.
+
+"Why?" she questioned.  "Don't you know?"
+
+"I know perfectly," he said.
+
+"Well?" she queried.  Then, as he made no response, "Haven't I the
+right to know?"
+
+"I can't say," he answered.  "I haven't the right to tell you."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"It isn't only mine to tell," he said.
+
+"It's hers, you mean?" she exclaimed.  "Everything's hers, I suppose,
+now; everything that you once could call your own!  Did you ever share
+your life with _me_ in that fashion?"
+
+"You forget," he said gravely. "_She_ shares herself."
+
+Ethel Vernon leaned towards him fiercely.  "Do you mean----" she began
+impetuously, and stopped.
+
+He turned and looked steadily into her angry eyes.  Her quick breath
+spread the starlight to a vague and smoky blueness among the gleaming
+sequins on her breast.  "Yes," he said, "that is probably what I _do_
+mean.  First or last, whatever you may call her, it's the woman's self
+that counts."
+
+She remained for a moment with her eyes still passionately alight, and
+something visible even in the dusk upon her face which she would and
+would not say.  Then her mouth hardened, and she flung herself back in
+her chair.
+
+"I hate you," she cried.
+
+"No," he said with a sigh; "you hate the fact.  Every woman does whom
+it doesn't profit."
+
+There was nothing said between them for some minutes, and Caragh could
+hear the silk ripple as her foot swung to and fro among the ruchings of
+her skirt.  The sound brought back another silence, when she had sat
+beside him on an English summer evening in a dusk almost as deep;
+brought back the hour from that scented night when, with the spells of
+strangeness still upon her charm, he had listened to her ankles' silken
+whisper, and felt in the dark the unendurable sweetness of her presence
+rob his life of its desires.
+
+He was carried so far by the memory that the change in her voice
+startled him when she spoke again.
+
+"What did you tell her about me," she demanded.
+
+"I didn't tell her anything," he said.
+
+"She hasn't asked about your past?"
+
+"Not yet."
+
+"You think she won't?"
+
+"Oh, no, I don't," he smiled.
+
+"And when she does!  Will you tell her the usual lie?"
+
+"Did I tell it to you?"
+
+"You didn't ask me to marry you," she thrust back.  "One treats the
+woman differently that one's going to _share_."
+
+"Yes," he admitted doubtfully, "it's very possible one does.  Only I
+think the sharing works the other way.  One tells her the truth in
+common honesty."
+
+"Never!" she exclaimed.  "You tell her the truth in transcendental
+lunacy, and wish you'd bitten your tongue out five minutes later when
+you see she thinks you a sweep."
+
+He turned towards her with a smile.  "I'm afraid my transcendental
+lunacies are about done," he said.
+
+She laughed.  "To judge by the last of them," she retorted.
+
+"The last of them!" he exclaimed reprovingly.  "You shouldn't speak of
+marriage by so wild a name."
+
+"I don't," she said shortly; "only of yours.  Will you swear to me that
+you love her?"
+
+"Willingly," he answered, "if you're unwise enough to ask."
+
+"To ask for an oath which would have no meaning?"
+
+"None whatever," he replied.  "What would you expect?"
+
+"The truth!" she said.  "Isn't it due to me?"
+
+"Yes," he admitted, "and you've had it; though it hasn't been easy.
+Consider if a man is likely to relish the sort of confession that I've
+made to you?"
+
+"You couldn't very well avoid it," she reminded him.
+
+"Oh, yes, I could," he said.  "I might have quarrelled with you--you're
+uncommonly easy to quarrel with--and then ... when you heard of my
+engagement you'd have put it down to pique."
+
+"You thought of doing that?" she asked distrustfully.
+
+"Yes, I thought of that and of a dozen other ways of--well, of taking
+you in," he admitted, "and of getting out of it myself."
+
+"It doesn't sound very brave," she said softly.
+
+"No, it sounds uncommon paltry, I've no doubt," he agreed.  "I funked
+it, and I tried to think it would have been kinder as well as
+pleasanter to keep you in the dark.  Would it?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Well, I don't know," he reflected doubtfully; "I fancy you'd sooner
+have thought that you had done it than that I had, however little you
+might have liked it.  And you'd have been a bit sorry for me, instead
+of thinking me a beast."
+
+"I'm sorry for you as it is," she answered quietly.
+
+"What do you mean?" he exclaimed.
+
+"I don't believe you love her," she said unsteadily.
+
+"Oh, well," he murmured with a shrug; "then I can't persuade you."
+
+She shook her head again--the little tossing shake which reminded
+Caragh sharply of how she used to tease him, through the curls that
+sometimes fall across her eyes.  He was looking at the stars before she
+spoke again.
+
+"I think there's one thing you might tell me which wouldn't hurt her if
+I knew," she said persuadingly.  "Was it because you'd come to care
+less for me that ... that you ... that you asked her?"
+
+He rose from his seat, and leant against the iron trellis of the
+balcony, looking out across the river.
+
+"Was it?" she pleaded.
+
+"No!" he said to the night.  He turned presently and took a step to
+enter the room.  "Time I went," he said, checking his progress as he
+passed her chair.
+
+She laid her fingers upon his sleeve.  "Morrie!" she whispered.
+
+He stooped and kissed her face, while her detaining hand slipped with a
+soft pressure into his.
+
+Then she let it go, and sat, listening, as the sound of his footsteps
+died away beyond the room; sat gazing out at the moving sky, with a
+face from which the light had faded, till Henry Vernon's voice
+surprised her dreams.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+It was in the following June that Caragh found himself preparing for
+his final visit to Ballindra.  Lettice Nevern and her brother had been
+in town for some six weeks during the winter, and his business affairs
+having straightened themselves, and enabled him to anticipate a
+sufficiently plausible income for two people, he had asked Arthur
+Nevern formally for his sister's hand.
+
+Nevern understood the proposal and the man who made it so slightly,
+that, displeased by the prospective loss of an admirable housekeeper,
+he began to pile up, breathlessly, inflated obstacles to its fulfilment.
+
+Caragh heard him out.
+
+"It's a confounded nuisance, of course, for you," he said; "these sort
+of things always are for somebody.  That's why I've waited to get my
+side of it square before bothering you, so that you'd know for certain
+from the outset when your sister would be leaving you.  We're not going
+to decide where to settle till we can look at places together, so that
+won't make for delay, but she refuses to be hurried over her kit, as
+it's to provide six months' food for some pet school of hers in
+Ballindra, so I've given her till July.  The only question is, would
+you sooner the wedding was over there or here?"
+
+Arthur Nevern stared at the younger man's directness, but he discovered
+speedily that he might stare as he pleased.
+
+The little that Lettice had was in her own right, and Caragh had asked
+no more with her from the man before him.
+
+Nevern was thus left with nothing to refuse but his consent, and that,
+apparently, was of no consequence to those who asked it.
+
+He gave it at last as ungraciously as he could, and agreed later that
+the ceremony should be in London, in order to share its expense with an
+aunt of his who had offered her house.
+
+He twitted Caragh with his impatience, and Caragh smiled.
+
+His smile touched a point of humour unlikely to tickle a future
+brother-in-law, but he suggested that a man's hurry to be married
+seldom appealed to his friends.
+
+He might have added that the reasons for it in his own case did not
+appeal to himself, but they were too serious and disconcerting even for
+his sense of the ridiculous.
+
+They were, put briefly, the possible attraction of another woman; and
+it was his despairing self-contempt that goaded him to dispose, so
+high-handedly, of any obstacles to his marriage with Lettice Nevern.
+
+It was particularly characteristic of him, that while reflecting almost
+every hour on some fantastic chance that might avert their union, he
+applied his foot with an almost unmannerly intolerance to any of the
+reasonable hindrances in its way.  That was of a piece, no doubt, with
+his marked aversion from any form of moral hedging, and his preferred
+fondness for an honest lie.
+
+He had stayed at Budapest for three days after his confession, to keep
+Ethel Vernon company till her husband's engagements were at an end.  He
+had asked her if she wished him to remain, and she had said
+indifferently that he must please himself.  He did not please himself;
+but he did not go.
+
+The terms on which they met and spoke were strained and curious.
+
+Caragh in his perverse fashion found them stimulating.  Ethel made not
+the faintest reference to what he had told her, but she treated him
+neither with the familiar plainness into which they had fallen, nor as
+a common and secure acquaintance.
+
+There was about her bearing an extraordinary delicacy and distance such
+as a girl uses to deny herself to the man to whom, unconscious, she
+has, proudly and irretrievably, given her heart.
+
+Having exhausted the interests of the town, they spent the time in long
+drives to the places she expressed a wish to see in the country; an
+occupation not pre-eminently adapted to an evasive relationship.
+
+On the fourth morning she said to him, simply:
+
+"I can't stand it any more.  You must go."
+
+"Have I been a brute?" he asked.
+
+"No," she said; "you've been extremely nice.  Perhaps that's why.  I
+don't know: I've tried not to know.  Perhaps I may feel differently
+when I meet you again.  I can't say.  I daresay not.  But I can't go on
+as we are.  You don't mind my asking, do you?  I don't think you wanted
+to stay.  Why should you?  I can make up something to Henry about your
+going: there's always the telegraph to account for things.  And don't
+write, please, unless I ask you to.  I'm going to try to forget you--if
+I can.  What's the use of doing anything else?  I've been a fool enough
+as it is."
+
+There was in Caragh's eye the remembrance of days when it seemed as if
+that desired oblivion would be his to seek, days when his devotion had
+appeared to be quite obliterated from her memory by the surprising
+splendour of some one else.
+
+That was, of course, the last thing of which he could remind her, but
+it was, too, the last he could forget.
+
+He had accepted the real misery of those days without murmuring; at
+least he might use their ancient poison as an anodyne now.  Not to
+excuse, nor to exalt himself, but to dilute, as it were, now that he
+had to drink it, the cup of her indignation.
+
+It made the sour of that seem, at least, not quite so much of his own
+mixing to remember that, twice at least in the last two years, he might
+have drifted from her on occasions when her attention was too engrossed
+by another to notice that he was gone.
+
+He would have liked in the friendliest fashion to have led her memory
+to those days, to show her how dispensable he was; only, he reflected
+one never knew how a woman would take that sort of consolation: he was
+not very sure if he would value it himself.
+
+And when it came to his good-byes, he felt anything but fitted for the
+consoler's office.  He had come to Pest bitterly grieved to lose a
+friend; but he left it like a baffled lover.
+
+The shy strangeness of her manner and the proud distance in her eyes
+had brought again about Ethel Vernon the glamour of days when his heart
+beat quicker at her approach.
+
+With every hour of indifference the old provocation in her presence
+grew.  He felt that to stay would be but to yield to it again, and he
+heard with a dismal relief her sentence of exile.
+
+He set himself rigidly to pack his things, yet where to go he could not
+determine.  That invisible bond which tied him to the future made all
+the difference to a man's plans.  The East beckoned--he was half way to
+it--and the green harbours of the Asian coast.
+
+But that meant money, as he knew of old, and it was lack of money that
+had deferred his vow.  In all honesty he could not spend upon himself
+what he had half pledged to another.  He turned disconsolately towards
+home.
+
+He drifted about during the autumn from one shoot to another.  It was
+his ordinary occupation for three months of the year, yet now it seemed
+unusual.  It seemed outside a new continuity of existence which had
+begun for him.
+
+But he devoted himself to settling his affairs, and was able in
+consequence, as has been narrated, to propose himself as an unwelcome
+relative when Arthur Nevern was in town.
+
+Caragh had looked forward doubtfully to meeting Lettice again, under
+conditions which might suit her so much less well as a background than
+the open downs and the sea.  But his forebodings were gloomy enough to
+be disappointed.
+
+She had some art in dress, as he had noted from her evening frocks, and
+if in the daytime she seemed for town sometimes a trifle decorative, it
+was a decoration on which those who passed her bestowed an approving
+eye.  She needed a certain amplitude to set her off.  The big fur
+collar, and the expansive hat made the modelling of her face seem
+daintier than it was.  With her hat off, her prettiness owed everything
+to the fair fine hair that curled almost to her eyes.  Maurice had once
+brushed it back in a playful moment, but he never risked the
+disillusionment again.  He needed every aid to his attachment that
+artifice could supply.
+
+She seemed, on her part, to be aware that her beauty required
+management.  It was not of a sort to be worn with a disdainful
+indifference as to how it might strike you.
+
+It had to be looked after, or it didn't strike you at all.  She kept a
+conscious eye upon her fringe, and she left occasionally, as Caragh had
+noticed, a harmless confederate with her complexion on the lapels of
+his coat.
+
+He brushed off the powder with a mixed sense of regret and gratitude.
+He was sorry she needed it but, since the need was there, better she
+had the wit to know it and the ambition to look her best.  Better far
+than to suppose with an arrogant vanity that to his infatuation nothing
+could come amiss.
+
+Of what, indeed, came most amiss she probably had not a suspicion.  The
+breezy life of Ballindra had admitted few mental interests, and, in the
+country, character, which it develops, often has the air of mind.  In
+Lettice, whose character was charming, the resemblance had deceived
+Caragh.  But in London, where character sinks and mind is on the
+surface, his estimate was corrected.
+
+He endured dreary plays in which she delighted; he sat bravely at
+ballad concerts; he listened without a groan to her enthusiasms upon
+domestic art; he tried to read the books she praised.
+
+The outlook was depressing.  The same fear touched him that must have
+fallen upon Babel.  Here, for life was a companion who on its finer
+interests would never understand a word he said.  He might, perhaps,
+bring her painfully to a sense of her unsuspected ineptitude; might
+make her mechanically conscious of the commonplace; might shake her
+faith in ignorance as a standard of art.  He might in fact taint the
+sincerity of her admirations.  That was all.
+
+In art--and art is but the tenderer appreciation of life--they would
+never use the same language, never understand each other's speech.  The
+marvelling thrill of familiar strangeness, of joyous apprehension,
+which the subtlety of art can wake in the initiate, they would never
+share.
+
+That was not much to miss, perhaps; but, when Caragh tried to think of
+something its absence would not affect, he stopped in dismay.
+
+Yet apart from her appearance, in spite of her deficiencies, the girl's
+love wrought a change in him of which, with surprise, he found himself
+aware.
+
+It became less of an effort to return her caresses, and her kisses no
+longer made him feel guilty of impersonating her lover.
+
+They never woke in his veins even a momentary ardour, and now, his
+pulse beat under them no whit the faster, but he had begun to grow
+susceptible to the quickened throb of hers.  The shy renouncement of
+her self-restraint, as she let the secrets of her being pass, between
+queer little moods of resistance, into the strangeness of his power,
+moved him to a sense of protective tenderness he had never felt before.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+It was shortly after he had said a last good-bye to Lettice Nevern that
+Caragh's troubles began afresh.
+
+He had the best intention to acquire the married habit, or a habit, at
+any rate, that should differ widely from the one he had.
+
+With that object he secluded himself for a fortnight from the life to
+which he was accustomed, and denied his company, for reasons which they
+vigorously disbelieved, to his friends.
+
+He could allow himself the theatre, having never cherished lime-lit
+illusions, nor hovered to dispel them about the stage door.  He had
+always what he was pleased to call a frugal taste in beauty, and had
+never made a bid for any that was 'priced'!
+
+But the theatres only served him for a week, and even so with some
+exaggeration of what he wished to see.  At the end of a second, he
+decided that a wife was as essential as repentance to a change of life,
+and dropped back into his old ways.
+
+And the devil, who, perhaps as a reprisal for the deficiencies of his
+own abode, takes a pleasure in knocking the bottom out of every sort of
+domicile, at once put his foot through the flooring of Maurice Caragh's
+reform.
+
+At least he met Laura Marton at the dinner which closed his fortnight's
+sojourn in the wilderness.
+
+He was suffering from those two weeks of his own society, but,
+probably, even without that preparation, he would have capitulated to
+her charm.
+
+To speak of him, so consecutively, in the hands of three women gives
+too crowded an impression of his susceptiveness.  No trait was, in
+fact, further from his character.
+
+Three years were passed since he met Ethel Vernon, and he had not
+harboured in all of them so much as a vexed thought about a woman's
+face.
+
+He was pleased so far from easily, that he might very readily have
+failed throughout his life to have been pleased at all.  But when
+pleased, it was on the instant and absorbingly.  Ten seconds he had
+suggested as an average requirement for falling in love, but it is
+questionable if any of his own declensions had taken half that time.
+Nor was proximity at all essential.  He could not recall, he admitted
+modestly, having discovered that a woman was adorable at more than a
+hundred yards.  But he had no wish to exalt his own experience into a
+standard: he could believe in anything up to half a mile.
+
+In that, such was the delicacy of his distinctions, he was perfectly
+sincere; but it was that delicacy which made them so prohibitive to
+adorations even at half a mile.
+
+Laura Marton might, perhaps, have tested such a distance successfully,
+she was so perfectly his conception of a type.
+
+He conceived a good deal in types, and preferred the typical even to
+the length of its deficiencies.
+
+Deficiency did indeed play a part in Laura Marten's attractions, since
+the broad mouth, the long eyes, and the drowsy luxuriance of her figure
+were without everything that could make them harmless.
+
+She came under the superbs in Caragh's catalogue, and to the superb he
+was almost a stranger.
+
+That, perhaps, speeded his intimacy.
+
+"You can take it for granted that I think you magnificent," he said at
+their first meeting.
+
+This was their last.  It epitomized sufficiently what had happened in
+the interval.  Some of it might be accounted for by his having told her
+that the next interval was for ever.
+
+The occasion was a dance at a big house in Grosvenor Square.  It was
+Caragh's last appearance as a bachelor in town, since he started on the
+morrow for a trip which the owners of a new Atlantic liner were taking
+in her round the Isles.  He was to be dropped at Ballindra, where his
+marriage, for recent family reasons, was after all to take place.
+
+He was seated on a lounge in a blind passage near the top of the house,
+and, though still early in the evening, he had been sitting there for
+some time.
+
+He knew the house more intimately than most of those who were seeking
+for such seats, and this one was left to him and his partner entirely
+undisturbed.  The music floated up the stairs with varying
+distinctness, as the dancers choked the entrances to the great gallery
+below.
+
+He was leaning back, with his arms half folded and a hand upon his
+mouth, looking straight before him.
+
+Laura Marton, sitting sideways with one white arm along the top of the
+lounge and the sweep of her amber-coloured skirts against his feet,
+bent forward insistently towards him; a braid of gold across her
+splendid shoulders, and a band of turquoise in her brown hair.
+
+The long soft fawn gloves were crumpled in her lap, and her left arm,
+which hung straight and bare beside her, tapped a turquoise fan against
+her ankle as she waited for his reply.
+
+"I know," he sighed.  "You don't and you can't see it: what's the use
+of my saying it again?  You're sure no woman would care for what I'm
+giving her, if she only knew.  I daresay; but, you see, she's not going
+to know.  She's going to luxuriate in an apparent adoration.  That's
+easier than to be happy with one that's inapparent, however actual.
+And it's a lot likelier that the make-believe will last; because--well,
+because there's nothing in it not to."
+
+He smiled whimsically at his own English, but the girl's face darkened
+with a frown.
+
+"It makes no difference how you put it," she exclaimed hotly; "the
+thing's detestable!  You'll only look at it from your point of view;
+and because it's costing you so much, you think it must be worth all
+that to the girl.  But it's not!  You're getting her life, and
+everything that's in her and of her, and you're getting it for a lie!
+You think it's a fine lie, I know, the sort of lie that life is all
+along.  You've told me that!  Oh, yes, you have; or something like it.
+But what are _you_ that you should handle a woman as if you had made
+her, and lie to her like a god!  Do you think you're big enough to make
+that seem fair?"
+
+"Ah, you don't understand," he murmured still staring before him,
+afraid to stir the fire in her smouldering eyes.  "I'm doing this
+because I'm so small."
+
+Her incredulous gasp was almost a repudiation; but she said nothing and
+he went on:
+
+"Because the love that's worth perfidies and desertion and all the
+other personal superlatives will never come my way.  I thought it
+would: yes! once, long ago.  But it hasn't, and it won't.  If I was big
+enough!"--he caught his breath--"Ah, that's another matter.  For _that_
+love excuses everything--'red ruin and the breaking up of
+laws'--because it's bigger, and better, and more enduring than the
+world itself.  But it isn't mine."
+
+He stopped, and faced for an instant the furious blaze of her eyes.
+Then he said more slowly:
+
+"So the next best thing seemed, for a man like me, to make a good
+girl's dreams come true; her dreams of love, and honour, and a man's
+desire ... when one is the man, and can."
+
+"You're not the man!" she cried.  "And it's wicked and cruel to pretend
+to be."
+
+"Look here!" he said persuasively.  "Suppose that you were as poor a
+thing as I am; suppose that you, too, had come to look for no more from
+love than it means to me, and that some one came along who took you for
+an angel; a man young and strong and pure with the one great passion of
+a lifetime showing all over him; and that, in too weak or too kind a
+moment you had let him take you in his arms, and let him believe then
+as true the dreams that he had dreamt of you, and sealed with your
+kisses the vows which he had sworn.  Well! when you'd come to realize
+that all his strength and sweetness hung on his belief in you, would
+you call it wicked and cruel to go on with the pretence?"
+
+She made no answer for some moments.  The grip of her white fingers
+relaxed upon the couch and the fan hung quiet against her ankle as she
+continued to absorb him with her devouring eyes.
+
+"You've forgotten _me_," she whispered at length.
+
+"No," he protested; "you can't say that, can you?  I told you at once."
+
+"Told me what?" she demanded.
+
+"That I was not free," he said.
+
+"Yes," she exclaimed, "the very first time you spoke to me.  As if I
+were certain to lose my heart if I had not been warned.  I hated you
+pretty hotly for it too, I can assure you.  And you might have saved
+yourself the trouble.  I'd been told it before."
+
+"Before?"
+
+"Yes, by Ethel Vernon.  She said, when she heard I was to meet you,
+'He's going to marry a girl that he doesn't care a sou for.'  How did
+she know?"
+
+"She didn't know," he said.
+
+"How did she guess then?  Had you been in love with her?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"She with you?"
+
+"You forget," he said gravely: "she's a married woman."
+
+"I did forget," she smiled.  "And was there no one you were in love
+with between her and me?"
+
+"I'm not in love with you," he said.
+
+She smiled again, drearily.  "Does it do you any good to say that?" she
+asked.
+
+"No," he answered; "I said it for you."
+
+"For me?" she objected.
+
+"Yes," he replied; "you said I'd forgotten you."
+
+"Do you call that remembering?" she enquired ruefully.
+
+"Don't you?" he murmured.  "Would I have said it for myself?"
+
+"Said what?" she asked.
+
+"That I'm not in love with you?"
+
+"I daresay," she said.
+
+"Even if it had not been true?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.  "I daresay," she said.
+
+"Do you?" he smiled.  "It's a good deal to dare."  He drew a long
+unsteady breath.  "Well," he sighed, "suppose it wasn't?"
+
+"Wasn't true?" she said.
+
+"Wasn't true," he repeated slowly.  "Suppose that I've--wilfully--lied
+to you.  Suppose that the hour I saw your face brought my lost dreams
+back to me; suppose that in you I found the woman for want of whom all
+my days have in despair been wasted; the one woman who could have made
+life splendid, and love passionate and ceaseless and supreme.  Or, no!
+not even that, not even that!  Suppose only that I felt your
+fascination as any man might feel it; that I was just bewitched by your
+beauty; that every day without its glamour was the darkness of death,
+and the thought of other men possessing it an unendurable torment.
+Suppose which you please, whichever seems to you simplest, or
+strangest, or most deplorable--and tell me again you think it was for
+my own sake that I was silent!"
+
+The musing tone in which he had begun was gone before he ended.  He had
+turned to her, even as he leaned a little back and away against the end
+of the lounge; his shoulders were squared, and his brows drawn above
+the gray eyes which gazed almost defiantly into her face.
+
+And as his mood hardened hers had melted.
+
+Darkness had spread again across her eyes; spread as the night above a
+lighted river--its depths a-glimmer with strange reflections, and her
+lips had fallen softly apart from their disdainful smile into an
+unconscious baby sweetness, through which she breathed.
+
+She was listening with an absorbed intentness, with all her senses
+crowding to her ears.
+
+Even her splendid carriage was relaxed; her bosom drooped; dark hollows
+showed about her throat; her chin sank, till the white shoulder on
+which she leaned almost touched a tiny ear; the fan slipped from her
+other hand and hung by the loop about her wrist.
+
+Her eyes met his as he ended; and, as it were, beneath the long silence
+of that look he could hear the brushing sound of the breath between her
+parted lips, like the far-off pulse of the sea.
+
+But he missed so the other change which came to her; came, as it were,
+when the senses which had been away, so tensely listening, returned
+with their news.  They brought back no erectness to her bearing, but
+deepened and coloured her drooping beauty till its languor became in
+itself a mien, a seduction that grew more perilous and overpowering
+with each quickening breath that filled her breast.
+
+But of all that Caragh noticed nothing.  He saw only those wavering
+lights in the liquid darkness of her eyes, a darkness that spread about
+him till he felt the draught and swirl of its unknown waters.
+
+It was from that he was taken by the sudden fastening of the girl's
+hands about his face, and he woke with a flash of enlightenment to all
+that was in hers.
+
+He tried to shake his head, but she only tightened her fingers about it
+and drew it towards her, smiling, with a strength that astonished him.
+
+"Don't," he said.
+
+But she pressed her wrists against his cheeks till his mouth was
+crushed between them, and drew him closer; closer to the strange smile
+upon her lips--cruel, passionate, triumphant, and yet adoringly
+fond--which seemed to come from beyond the borders of the world he knew.
+
+Then, with a bird's swiftness, her lips were against his face, bruising
+it with the wildness of her kisses, as she held it in a clutch that
+pained him to the plundering madness of her mouth.
+
+Unable to speak, he caught her wrists to draw them from his face, but
+at the touch of her skin his hands lost the power to help him, and hung
+idly like heavy bracelets upon her arms.
+
+They had slipped to her elbows and fallen unclasped from them, when, as
+suddenly as she had seized it, she thrust his face from her to the full
+length of her arms and held it there, gazing into it with the fury of
+despoiled possession, which had the same savage strangeness as her
+smile.
+
+Caragh's eyes were gravely distressed.  "Don't, don't!" he pleaded.
+
+Then she opened her hands and threw his face out of them away from her,
+with a little low crying laugh horrible to hear, and sat, leaning
+sideways and motionless, her head propped on her wrist, looking away
+from him across the back of the lounge.
+
+Caragh merely straightened himself in the corner where she had flung
+him.  He did not turn to look at her, and said nothing.
+
+There was something in what had happened past explaining; its very
+lawlessness made it natural, put it outside of everything, in a place
+by itself where there were no measurements, where there was no
+proportion.
+
+He was unconscious of any surprising experience, and did not give a
+thought to what might be passing in the girl's mind.
+
+And she, sitting there with that wrecked air of passion, seemed as
+utterly indifferent how she appeared to him.
+
+"You were right," he said at length, looking straight before him: "I've
+done it all for myself."
+
+She gave him, without turning, a glance from her exhausted eyes, but
+took no further notice.
+
+"I'm going back because I _daren't_ fail her.  I think too little of
+myself, God knows, to risk thinking less.  Can you understand that?  I
+was falling lower and lower, losing hope that I could ever be constant
+to anything that loved me.  Then she came.  It hadn't mattered with the
+others.  I was only something to them that any one could be.  But she
+was different--different because she had never loved before, and I
+meant everything to her that love can mean to a woman's life,
+everything that is sacred and tender and divine.  And I saw in keeping
+her love pure and happy the one thing that could lift me out of the pit
+and let me look myself in the face again.  It's the one chance that's
+been given me, and if I can't take it I'm done for.  Yes, it's sheer
+selfishness, as you said; but I'm going back to her.  Do you
+understand?"
+
+She did not move nor look round at him.  "You love me," she said dully.
+
+"It makes no difference," he answered.
+
+She gave a little mirthless laugh.
+
+"But it will," she said; "it will.  You'll remember me when she can't
+understand you, and my kisses when you're sick of hers, and my arms
+when she's asleep beside you.  You won't think _then_ that it makes no
+difference.  You won't say _then_ that she was the one chance for you.
+You'll remember then that a woman loved you whose love was all that you
+had dreamed.  Maurice, Maurice, you're not the sort of man that makes a
+saint!"
+
+He turned to her and put out his hand.  "I'm going," he said.
+"Good-bye!"
+
+She laid her left hand in it.  Hers was quite cold, but she shivered as
+she touched him.  "Will you come back to me ever?" she asked.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Never?"
+
+"Never, never!"
+
+"If you want me, you must say," she went on impassively.  "It won't
+matter what I'm doing--I mean if I'm married, or anything.  If you want
+me, I'll come to you.  But you must say.  Love ... ah! you don't know
+what it means!"
+
+He left her with a pressure of the hand, and she caught a glimpse of
+him as he groped his way towards the stairs.  But she did not stir, nor
+try to stop him.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Caragh sat with his back to the saloon skylight, watching the
+cloud-shadows racing over the soft green Irish coast.
+
+Between him and it was a heaving space of dark blue water, crested here
+and there with gleaming white.
+
+The gale of the night was blowing itself out, but the wind still sang
+against the spars that swung to and fro through a wider arc of the sky
+than most of the guests on board found compatible with an appearance at
+breakfast.
+
+Woolly flocks of white cloud came up from the Atlantic, raced through
+the clear blue overhead, and huddled down together behind the land.
+
+It was a day boisterous with the joy of life, but Caragh's face showed
+no appreciation of its quality.  His chair slid forward and back with
+the rolling deck, but his eyes were fixed gloomily upon the green
+hills, and he paid no heed to his own movement.
+
+His sombre absorption gave him the appearance of being affected by the
+floundering seas; but he never suffered from sea-sickness and was
+grateful to the gale for having cleared the deck of the ship's jovial
+company.
+
+He wished to be by himself, and yet it was himself that he was most
+anxious to evade; it was from self-sickness that he was suffering.
+
+He had spoken the truth in telling Laura Marton that the faith in
+Lettice Nevern's eyes was his one hope of deliverance.  He believed, if
+he could respond to that, even with the honest dishonesty which alone
+was possible--if he could, as he told her, "make a good girl's dreams
+come true"--that he might in time build up for himself an artificial
+constancy, and so regain his self-esteem.
+
+That hope seemed not too high, face to face with the woman who was
+doing her best to shatter it.  It sustained him while he was fighting
+her fascination--successfully, as he told himself; while he was
+dragging his weakness in a wounded sort of triumph, out of her reach;
+while he was hurrying his things on board the day after.
+
+But there, unluckily, his victory ended.  Seated apathetically in a
+deck-chair on the _Candia_, watching the long coast slip by from Thanet
+to the Lizard, the leaden turmoil of the Channel, and then the clouded
+purples of the Kerry Hills, he learnt how superficial was his
+advantage, how deeply he was in bondage.
+
+He had, indeed, got out from England, but he had brought so little of
+himself away that it seemed an impertinence to offer it to any woman in
+marriage.  His heart--or at least what in such affairs is called the
+heart--and all those cravings of the body which go with the heart were,
+and would remain, in Laura Marten's keeping.
+
+She was right in every boast of her dominion over him.  She was the
+woman for whom he had not waited, of whom long ago he had despaired.
+The woman who could have satisfied him body and soul, absorbing his
+desires, inspiring his dreams.
+
+No partiality in the past had persuaded him to imagine that of any
+woman he had admired.  They were just what they were--dainty, lovely,
+brilliant, bewitching; but nothing more to him than to any one who had
+a taste for them.
+
+But here at last was the woman made for him, mad for him: warm with
+that fugitive spirit of sense which was in her only and for him alone.
+
+He knew that, though he knew not how he knew it, as certainly, as
+responsively as a lock knows the wards of its key.
+
+It was as a key that she had entered him; and within him, at her
+moving, the levers of a secret life had stirred--a strange new
+complexity of being which no mortal influence had disturbed before.
+
+She had revealed to him all that life had not yielded him, all that now
+it could never yield, a correlation undreamed of between man and woman.
+
+And she had come curiously too late.  That was his bitterness.  He
+would have sacrificed for her every other allegiance of the past, save
+this one which brought him no pleasure.  From Lettice Nevern he could
+only come to her as a man debased for ever in his own esteem.  Nothing
+could excuse such a betrayal, nothing could redeem him after it was
+done.
+
+Happiness with the woman he must marry was out of the question; but
+happiness without her was now for him equally uncompassable.  He had a
+choice only between two sorts of despair.  Under such conditions it
+seemed improbable that he would prove a very cheerful companion, but
+such predictions were with Caragh especially difficult.  His humour was
+always available for his own misfortunes, and in this case his fortune
+was too deplorable not to be concealed.
+
+Since it entirely absorbed his unconscious thoughts his attention
+always seemed preoccupied; an abstraction which lent however, an
+agreeable effect of detachment from ordinary worries.
+
+He was, perhaps for that reason, the serenest member of the ship's
+company, and the one most obligingly at the service of other men's
+affairs.
+
+But on this windy morning he was allowed to reflect on his own
+adversities, till a shout from forward called his eyes towards the
+shore.
+
+The _Candia_ had just cleared a long headland and opened the narrow bay
+beyond, where, canted slightly to starboard, lay a big three-master,
+the rags of her royals and a staysail slapping the wind, the long blue
+rollers breaking against her in spouts of foam.
+
+She was evidently on the rocks, and yet an impracticable distance from
+the forbidding shore, which swept in a purple skirting of cliff about
+her.  Dark figures could be seen moving on the bridge and in the
+rigging, and the flutter of a woman's skirts could be made out against
+the shrouds.
+
+The _Candia_ stood in towards the shore, and her decks were soon
+crowded with excited passengers, waiting anxiously the lowering of a
+boat and speculating on the way in which a rescue would be attempted.
+
+A line of colour ran up to the barque's peak, and was answered
+presently by a signal from the steamer; then the engines slowed and
+stopped.
+
+The _Candia_ rolled ponderously in the long swell while another signal
+was exchanged the splash of the lead becoming suddenly audible in the
+silence.
+
+The vessels were now not more than five hundred yards apart, and every
+detail could be seen upon the wreck.
+
+Save for the few figures on the bridge and poop, all those on board her
+had taken to the rigging, as the sloping decks were swept by the
+heavier waves.
+
+Several women could be seen on her, and the glass showed them to be
+lashed to the shrouds, and apparently exhausted.
+
+Each fresh evidence of urgency increased the impatience on board the
+_Candia_.  Yet no scheme of assistance seemed in progress.  The engines
+were reversed, the _Candia_ backed in a trifle closer, the roar of the
+breakers began to make a continuous moil in the air, but the boats hung
+undisturbed on their davits.
+
+The captain was on the bridge and could not be questioned, but
+presently Sir Anthony Palmer, who as chairman of the _Candia's_ company
+was superintending the cruise, was seen coming aft with a grave face.
+
+He said, in answer to a volley of questions, that no help could be
+given till the sea went down and the tide had risen.  A ledge of rocks
+lay between the two ships, already defined occasionally by a thrash of
+foam over which no boat could pass.
+
+The stranger must have been carried across it at high water some hours
+earlier, had struck on a second ledge between that and the shore, and
+was now equally cut off from succour from the sea or from the land.
+
+Rockets were at once suggested, but Sir Anthony explained that the
+distance was too great for a rocket line to cover, and that the tides
+precluded the floating in of a buoy.  Nothing could be done but wait
+and pray that the vessel might not break up during the next twelve
+hours.
+
+Some one asked if she were likely to, and Sir Anthony admitted that she
+had signalled her fears of such an event.
+
+"Couldn't some one swim to her?" said a voice from the taffrail.
+
+Sir Anthony shook his head; to cross the ledge with the break of water
+on it at present would be to court almost certain death.
+
+There was a pause; all eyes were turned towards the reef, where the
+vessel lay in the gay morning, like some masquerade of death, between
+the lovely colours of the sea and shore.
+
+Caragh leant back in his chair with a yawn, and looked up at the sky.
+
+"I'll take a line to her," he said placidly.
+
+The backs of the heads between him and the ship's side became suddenly
+a ring of faces, and the first stupidity of surprise was expressed by
+the question, "Can you swim?"
+
+Caragh looked at them with no expression of interest, and Sir Anthony
+shook his head.
+
+"You couldn't do it, my dear fellow," he protested; "you couldn't do
+it!"
+
+"Perhaps not," said Maurice; "but I can have a try."  Sir Anthony's
+hands and head shook in voluble negation.
+
+"The captain wouldn't permit it for a moment," he asserted.
+
+"Well," said Caragh, "of course the captain can refuse me the use of a
+line, but he can't, without being very unpleasant, prevent my going
+overboard."
+
+There was an instant's pause, and then the group about the chair burst
+into simultaneous suggestion and advice.
+
+Caragh was slapped on the shoulder; his previous performances in the
+water were demanded; encouragement and remonstrance were alternately
+tendered, and everything obvious on the situation was said.
+
+"I'm not a professional performer," he explained at last, "but I can
+keep afloat as long as most men, and if I'm ready to take the risks of
+a swim, I don't think it should be any one's business to stop me."
+
+This met a varied response, and with a general acclamation for the
+captain the speakers were moving forward when that officer appeared,
+looking for Sir Anthony, who at once put the case to him.
+
+The captain, with a glance at Caragh still seated in his chair,
+dismissed the matter with a shrug of his shoulders.  But he had
+miscalculated the passiveness of the man before him.
+
+Caragh got quietly upon his feet, looked across the water at the wreck,
+and then turned to the captain.
+
+"If you can't spare me a line to take on board her, I'll have to bring
+you back one of hers," he said.
+
+"I forbid you to leave the ship," replied the other briefly.
+
+"Of course you can do that," said Caragh, looking again across the sea,
+"but it won't make a pretty story if those poor devils are drowned
+under our eyes."
+
+At that moment a sailor brought the signalling slate aft to the
+captain, who looked glum and handed it to Sir Anthony.
+
+"Tide's leaving her," he explained.
+
+"Her back is breaking, is that it?" asked Sir Anthony.
+
+The captain nodded.
+
+"She won't hold together long after that?"
+
+"Probably not," said the captain.
+
+Caragh's offer found none but backers when the gravity of the signal
+was made known.
+
+The captain still protested its insanity, but he was persuaded in the
+end to withdraw his prohibition and do what was possible to start the
+venture with the best chances of success.
+
+The ship was to be taken a little nearer the southern shore to give the
+swimmer what help could be had from the tide, and the lightest line on
+board was prepared while Caragh went below to strip, accompanied by a
+couple of admirers, who insisted on the necessity of his being oiled
+before entering the water.
+
+As he never expected to come out of it alive he had no wish for oil,
+but did desire urgently to be left alone for the next few moments.
+
+He had made his offer from no surge of sympathy, no flush of valour.
+He was not braver probably than most of those on board, nor cared
+twopence more than they for the fate of the derelicts.  His proposal
+was but the climax of his morning thoughts.  He could endure himself no
+longer.  The wretchedness of his passion would bear no further the
+thought of the girl he was on his way to meet.  Every instant in the
+day-time, and night after night in his dreams, that splendid presence
+possessed him to which he had for ever said good-bye.  And in the fever
+of that possession he could not think of a wife.  Yet of what else
+could he think, as every hour brought her nearer, and made sharper for
+him the shame of her exultant face, and the reproach in her confiding
+arms.  Never for an instant had his tenderness faltered.  She was
+dearer to him than a sister; dearer by all she had given him, by all
+she was prepared to give; dearer above all by what she believed him to
+have given her.
+
+And it was his tenderness that made unendurable the treachery of his
+faithfulness, the loyalty of the lie which was to make them one.
+
+It was at the worst of such a reflection that death suddenly appeared
+to him as the escape, the release for them both; for the pledge which
+he had given and for her trust in his word.
+
+Death, a high and honourable end, making a finish to his unprofitable
+life, leaving her with faith undimmed!
+
+At that cold moment of his abasement there seemed nothing better.
+Given an hour to think it over and he would probably have recoiled from
+the sacrifice.  There was even some measure of recoil in his mind as he
+went down the reeling ladder to his cabin, though there was no change
+in his determination.  Death had ceased to look attractive; it was
+simply something for which, like a fool, he had let himself in.  Yet
+under that was a dull indifference to what became of him.
+
+He submitted to his oiling; then just as he was about to leave his
+cabin a remembrance came to him.  He fumbled in his berth for the
+sovereign-case on his watch chain, opened it, slipped out a couple of
+gold pieces, took what looked like a wafer from beneath them, and put
+it into his mouth.  The two men with him imagined the small gray disc
+to be some kind of sustaining lozenge.  It was a tiny portrait of Laura
+Marton.
+
+As he went shivering on deck Caragh made a wry mouth as his teeth met
+on the picture, and he imagined the suggestions its discovery would
+have offered to the woman he was to wed.
+
+He had a hazy recollection afterwards of the close and eager crowd
+which surrounded him as he fitted the clammy belt of the lifeline about
+his body and climbed over the taffrail for a dive.  It was a crowd warm
+with enthusiasm and admiration; with little to say, but with that in
+what it said which might have brought a blush to his whole body.  But
+he heard nothing.
+
+Then as the vessel lurched to starboard he let his body fall forward
+and shot down into the sea.
+
+Before his head rose above the surface the cold water had changed his
+indifference to life into a disgust at his own temerity.
+
+The ship heeled over as if about to impale him with her yards.  Then he
+was lifted on the roller, and saw the wreck before him, looking much
+further off than it had from the deck.  He laid his course on a cliff
+to the south which the captain had given him to steer by, and turned
+over on his side.  His left arm swung high and white out of the blue
+water, regular and unhurried as though he were bathing, and his head
+dipped under and was driven clear of the surface with every stroke.
+With his face thrown back he could see the dark skirting of spectators
+along the ship's side swinging into and out of the sky.
+
+They were admiring in speech and in silence his courage and cool
+indifference to the occasion, and the humour of their admiration moved
+him as he thought of it almost to a laugh.
+
+That he, with his despairs, his self-contempt, his growing disgust at
+his foolhardiness, should appear to them as a heroic figure appealed to
+his keen sense of parody.  What pretty reading in unconscious irony
+would the obituary paragraphs of his valour make for the gods of fate.
+
+Yet valour of a sort he had, for it never once occurred to him to feign
+an inability to go further, though the line he carried was beginning to
+retard him at every stroke.
+
+The ship he had left was now lost to him in each trough of the waves;
+he could hear the break of the rollers over the reef, and saw that the
+tide had already drifted him to windward of the wreck.  The roar in
+front increased as he proceeded, and at last he could see, as he rose,
+the waves thirty yards beyond him suddenly flatten, flinging up a veil
+of spray into the air.  For a moment he hung irresolute; there, if ever
+a man might see it, was death visible before him.  Then, with a curious
+sense of obliteration, his mind cleared.  It seemed empty of thought or
+fear as the open sky above him; not a shred even of anticipation
+floated anywhere within it.  He trod water as he gathered a dozen loops
+of the lifeline in his hand, lest he should be hung up and dragged
+under by it when flung over the ledge.  Then he went forward.  A moment
+later, when the wave that had lifted him suddenly sank and smashed
+before him into a terrible welter of foam above the reef, his heart
+sank; but decision was past him.  He knew that he was rising on the
+wave that followed, heard a strange crisp noise above him, and felt the
+crest dart forward like the head of a snake.
+
+The next instant he was rolled up in the foam and flung onward like a
+whirling wheel.  He lost his senses for a second from sheer giddiness,
+and found himself fighting for breath and the surface in almost quiet
+water, with the black sides of the wreck not fifty yards ahead.
+
+The line was coiled about his body, but his limbs were free, and he
+seemed quite unhurt, and strangely unsurprised to be so, though but a
+moment back he had been prepared for destruction.
+
+He was soon on the lee side of the wreck, and after some little
+difficulty was hauled on board, being too weak to lift himself from the
+water.
+
+He fell when set down upon the deck, and only then discovered that two
+of the bones in his left foot were broken, and that blood was draining
+from a gash nine inches long in his thigh.  He also became aware that,
+unlike the _Candia_, the wreck carried a mixed cargo of humanity, and
+was amused even in his unhappy plight to notice that its immense relief
+and gratitude quite overruled any considerations of sex.
+
+There was no surgeon on board, the saloons were awash; but the women
+tore up their petticoats to bind his wound, and, rolled in blankets
+from the deck-house, he was made fast to the driest part of the poop.
+
+There, drenched with spray and in a good deal of pain, he lay till
+evening, declining to use the means of safety he had provided till all
+but the captain and second mate had left the ship.  The rigging up of a
+traveller had proved a difficult matter with the wreck heeling over as
+the tide left her, and the wind rising again after the ebb made all
+other means of communication impossible.
+
+The captain was only got on board the _Candia_ as darkness was falling,
+and Caragh had some salve for his hurts in the knowledge that the wreck
+slid off the reef and sank at high water before the next dawn.
+
+He drew near Ballindra with sentiments a good deal modified by his
+adventure.
+
+Life had proved itself to be worth more to him than he had supposed,
+and sheer weakness from loss of blood as he lay bandaged on the sunny
+deck made the quiet certainty of a woman's love seem good in itself.
+
+Sir Anthony had telegraphed a very picturesque account of the rescue,
+and owing to the _Candia_ having to put back to land her new passengers
+Lettice had read the story before Caragh arrived.
+
+There is, perhaps, no happier moment possible to a woman than that in
+which she hears the world applauding the man she loves and is about to
+marry.
+
+To Lettice, so new to love and to a near interest in any of the world's
+noises, the moment was almost overwhelming.  It was a pain of
+happiness, a tense fear that such glad fortune could not endure.
+Caragh had sent her a wire, more kind than true, to say that he was
+mending splendidly, but she tortured herself with every sort of
+deplorable anticipation, till she came to expect little from the
+_Candia's_ arrival but her lover's body.
+
+But she woke one morning to see the big liner, gay with flags, lying
+before her windows at the mouth of the river.
+
+She dressed at a pace that left her maid staring, and took the steepest
+of short cuts to the slip.  There, at that hour of the morning, not a
+soul was to be seen, so she hauled in the lightest of the moored boats
+and sculled herself down the river against the tide.
+
+On the way the maiden modesty, which had so far been as breathless as
+every other part of her, found a word to say.
+
+For a moment the sculls stopped, and then dipped slowly to hold her
+against the tide.
+
+Then the boat went ahead again, but more deliberately.  While she was
+dressing Lettice had forgotten every one in the world but herself and
+Maurice.  Now, with the big ship before her, she remembered the others.
+
+As she ran down to the slip she had thought of nothing but to get to
+him as soon as possible.  Now there seemed a dozen things besides, all
+very important for a young lady.
+
+But her doubts and fears were set at rest by a shout from the ship, and
+she looked over her shoulder to see Caragh standing by the flag pole
+waving his hat.
+
+He was at the head of the gangway as she came up it, on a pair of
+improvised crutches, looking very white, but with nothing left her to
+wish for in the welcome of his eyes.
+
+Sir Anthony, who was at his elbow, as radiant as herself, protested
+fussily at his imprudence, and walked them both over to the
+chart-house, which had been arranged for Caragh's use, where he left
+them to order breakfast.
+
+Lettice, fastened to her seat by the windows round her, and dumb with
+happiness, could only gaze into Caragh's face.  He looked back at her
+with a smile, which broke at last in laughter.
+
+"You've heard all about it?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, I should think I had!" she breathed.
+
+"Comic, wasn't it?"
+
+"Comic!" she repudiated indignantly; "how _can_ you?"
+
+"I can't," he replied ruefully; "it's comic only for me, and no one
+else will ever see it.  Ah, but if you knew!"
+
+"I _do_ know," she exclaimed imposingly, "and every one else knows that
+you were a hero."
+
+"On Monday?" he queried.
+
+"Yes," she said proudly, "on Monday."
+
+"Heroes were cheap on Monday," he explained with a whimsical sigh, "but
+I've been a hero when heroes were very, very dear."
+
+She looked at him with the wistful misgiving which was always stirred
+by his half-serious banter.  "I know a hero," she said, "who is very,
+very dear to-day."
+
+He met the love in her eyes with such a tender appreciation that,
+disregarding the windows, she had half risen to kiss him, when the head
+steward entering, wrinkled with smiles and suffusing the joyousness of
+the occasion, set a breakfast tray between them.
+
+He greeted Lettice with the custom of an old retainer, and commented on
+Caragh's health as though personally responsible for its condition.
+
+"We're all that proud of him, miss, I can tell you," he said as he
+withdrew with the covers.
+
+But his flattery was spoilt for Lettice by the appearance of a meal
+which declared the newness of the morning with such emphasis.
+
+"Was it awful, coming at such an hour?" she begged of Caragh.
+
+"Shocking," he said unmoved; "five minutes earlier and you'd have found
+me in my bath."
+
+"Oh!" she groaned; "I wish I'd waited for you on shore."
+
+"In that case," he said, "I should probably have never landed."
+
+"Never landed!"
+
+"No," he went on; "I should have taken your absence for a sign that you
+couldn't goad yourself to meet me; that you were cowering at home,
+dreading my arrival, and with your heart lost to a much lovelier young
+man."
+
+"Oh, Maurice!"
+
+"Yes," he continued; "I have never been able to believe that any
+woman's flighty little soul could be worthy of my own virgin and
+unchangeable affection."
+
+"Maurice," she pleaded, "don't say things like that to-day; I want you
+to be quite serious and quite yourself."
+
+"Heaven forbid!" he protested as he took her hand.
+
+The chief engineer had devised a sling to lower Caragh into the boat;
+the purser had illuminated an inscription to him, signed by every one
+on board; there seemed to be innumerable hands to shake and good wishes
+to respond to before the boat was clear of the ship's side.
+
+And then he had to wave his hat again and again to the cheers and
+shouts of farewell, Lettice sitting beside him burning like a rose.
+
+But her hour came when she had him laid at last upon a sofa by his
+favourite window, and was kneeling on the floor beside him.  Her mouth
+had been thirsting all day to kiss him, and when he leaned his head
+back and smiled at her she set her lips on his as though to drink from
+them.
+
+"Oh, my darling," she murmured, lifting her face to look once more into
+his eyes, "you can't think what these last few days have been.  It
+didn't seem possible that you could live and come back to me after
+doing all those splendid things.  It was too much happiness for any
+one.  And I was horrid and faithless, and felt sure you'd die.  I ought
+to have known that God would take care of us, because you'd been so
+brave and loved me so."
+
+Despite himself there was a tinge of pain and shame that showed on
+Caragh's face, and Lettice lifted her arm that had rested, ever so
+lightly, across his body.
+
+"Did I hurt you, dear?" she questioned anxiously.
+
+"Oh, it's only just at first," was his ambiguous answer.  But he drew
+her face towards him and kissed it again.
+
+
+
+Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.
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+End of Project Gutenberg's The Plague of the Heart, by Francis Prevost
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 59798 ***