CHAPTER IX

“Il n’y a que le premier pas qui coute.”—French Proverb.

The Commissioner, in company with Mrs. Arthur White and the Colonial Treasurer, was booked for England in the next steamer that called at Key Island. The mail came in once a month, but occasionally an alteration of route would bring lesser boats to the great coaling-station as well as the cruisers, and Mr. Halton plainly said that he would go in a tin kettle of a tramp rather than wait longer than was necessary. His work being finished, the Commissioner found no reason for lingering. There was indeed a sting in Mr. Halton’s secret consciousness that made Key Island the more distasteful. His rides and walks and dilettante attendances on Mrs. Lewin were no more, for he was superseded by a stronger personality and writhed to face the failure of his life in a new form. Something of the feline nature that Diana Churton had bluffly discerned was uppermost in him also, and he waited for a mental pounce since he was no longer purring under a soft hand. A small man is infinitely more dangerous to irritate than his brother of a larger nature, because he deals with details, and the trivialities that go to make up tragedies are his province. Halton was waiting, though not consciously, to avenge himself for the fact that he had allowed the Administrator to displace him with Mrs. Lewin, and act cavalier in an uncouth method of his own; and there was no weak spot in their armour that could have escaped him. But Chum, having nothing to conceal, was not a remunerative study, and the Commissioner fretted in vain until the rains came down and blotted out Port Victoria for a space during which he lost even the contemplation of his annoyance, for when the Heavens open the social life is paralysed.

September brought back the sunshine, and the Gilderoys gave a picnic. Being the herald of renewed amusement, it had an air of festivity that most like entertainments lacked in their deadly monotony. Every one went, from Maitso out to Mitsinjovy, and Mrs. Lewin put on her last new muslin gown and looked at herself in the glass with mingled satisfaction and regret. She had ridden and danced and picnicked through the remainder of her big trunks in the last six months, for muslin is perishable and silk goes rotten in those latitudes; and Key Island knew the very pattern of her laces save this last white wonder with its unutterable frills and the grace of fancy sleeves. Leoline was a woman whose figure gave one the idea of one lovely line swept off harmoniously from throat to heel. She might wear muslins made on anybody’s pattern, but they became her own muslins by immediate association, and followed the fall of her lissome body as though they loved her.

“Just come and choose my hat, Ally,” she called through the dressing-room door, and Alaric’s broad shoulders and smooth head followed her summons dutifully. There was no outward difference between husband and wife; the same easy relations existed between them that made Mrs. Lewin’s nickname of “Chum” typical, the same surface confidence that caused Ally to staunchly assert to Mrs. Churton that his married life was entirely satisfactory, and he himself a beast. The qualification marked the advance of their intimacy. But in her heart Mrs. Lewin knew that she was altering; some new strong development was taking place in the very fibres of her nature, and the transformation was a painful process to herself at any rate. It was even a different face that she saw in the glass as Ally looked over her shoulder and condemned her choice.

“Not that chiffon thing, Chum, surely. Aren’t you going to wear a habit?”

“It’s too hot. Besides, I wish to leave a good impression on Mr. Halton’s mind, and this is his last festivity. He leaves next week, and takes the memory of my muslin with him. Isn’t it pretty?”

“Damfino! as thePink’unused to say—or was it theReferee? It’s new too, isn’t it?”

“My last. Why don’t you like that hat? Will my Panama do?”

“That’s better. Who will ride with you, Chum? Halton?”

“Major Churton, I think. With a possible reversion to Brissy.”

“Why not Gregory’s Powder? Think of my interests!”

“He is not coming with us, but will turn up at our destination. He has business that will keep him down at the office until later,” said Mrs. Lewin without hesitation over the Administrator’s plans, for she knew them, and knew also deeper reasons for them, which she did not tell Ally—reasons that fed the activity of her mind, and to which she listened with the faithfulness of a tried friend. For when Gregory laid the heavy weight of his confidence gradually upon her, he bound her with a chain whose iron links she hardly felt more than silken as yet.

Ally accepted her information as more infallible than an official telegram. “The O.C.T. has his innings first then,” he added. “Hurry, Chum! I told them to saddle up.”

Mrs. Lewin thrust a last fierce hatpin into her Panama, and put up her hand to settle the hairpins at her neck. It was four o’clock, and they were due at the rendezvous at half-past, for this was a late picnic which began in the afternoon and ran on into nightfall. Such excursions can be planned for two periods of the day—early morning, or when the sun is losing its power, but between those hours lies the Miroro, when no white man may work or play. A morning picnic sets out before seven, breakfasts up on the hills, and buries itself in the heart of the woods during the day’s heat, emerging again at four for the return to dinner and iced drinks; but it means a long strain on the endurance of the guests’ attraction for each other, and the Gilderoys were wise in their generation and chose the shorter method.

At the foot of Maitso the Lewins fell in with Halton on his way from Government House, and Brissy Nugent hot from a canter from Mitsinjovy, where he had been lunching. The four ponies turned sturdily to the ascent, and Mrs. Lewin looked at the streaked flanks of Ally’s mount, and thanked Heaven for the blanket under her saddle, for Liscarton’s wet sides did not agree with her frills. There had been, to her secret amusement, a brief struggle between Halton and Nugent as to who should ride beside her, and the soldier’s more brazen tactics had won the coveted place. Brissy was not thin-skinned, and that Halton shrugged his shoulders mentally, and classified him as still an unlicked cub, did not trouble him so much as it would have done to be proved the weaker man.

Mrs. Lewin laughed silently, and as usual found reason for enjoyment in her immediate present. Afterwards it seemed as if every detail of that day were cruelly impressed on her memory, and she never could forget one. Even the garrison jokes that Brissy told her in doubtful taste, and at which she had learned the futility of frowning, remained in her mind long after things she would fain have kept had drifted from her. She could remember the very smell from the vegetation which had overgrown the road during the recent rain, and turning in her saddle to look down and see the satin blue bay and the roofs of the crazy little town, whose zinc shone like a glare of silver in the sunshine. Beyond Mitsinjovy the Left Gate stood out like a vast sentinel, shutting out the sea and the horizon, but from Maitso Hill they could only see the cone of the Right Gate rising over their own position. Below them in the harbour the great walls of coal looked nothing but toy-mounds and black lines, and the mass of shipping was but a detail in the picture.

Often as she had seen that view Mrs. Lewin was vaguely conscious of seeing it afresh that day, and the row of ravenalas outside the Churtons’ quarters, too, struck her as they never had before, while there seemed a new suggestion that she could not grasp in the two mounted figures themselves, waiting motionless in the logwood shade. Diana was at her best in the saddle, but the Major, who could have ridden down any man present, looked too large for a Key Island pony. Even at the moment Leoline Lewin wondered that she noticed these things, and seemed possessed of a novel alertness, a keener sense of observation than ever before, as though her mental life had quickened. She always thought of the Gilderoys’ picnic as the last occasion on which she wore muslin appropriately. She liked to be in sympathy with her gowns, and she never again felt the adequate frivolity for the dainty frills she laid aside that night. Life seemed to have gone too deep for muslins from that time forth—a foolish fancy, but one that made the successful little frock something of a relic.

“How are you, Chum? The Gilderoys are waiting at the top of the hill,” Diana called out strongly. “Half the Station is up there already. Wait a minute—here comes the Denver girl and Gurney.”

Mrs. Lewin looked at Major Churton, and sat still.

“An invitation with R. S. V. P. in the corner,” said the Major succinctly to himself, and went straight to his goal in characteristic fashion. “Do I ride with you, Mrs. Lewin?”

“I will trust you to go first!” said Chum gaily. “There will be no riding with any one if I know the path we are taking. The ponies slide down on their tails the other side of Maitso, for I am sure we are going over the Pass and towards Rano.”

“The Gilderoys are fools if they do,” he said, as they fell into the procession side by side. “Do you know what Rano means, by the way?”

“I am not quite ignorant, Major! It means water in Malagasy, and is given to that range of hills because of the many springs there—have I learned my geography lesson rightly? How lovely the Rano Falls are, by the way! We rode out there just before the rains.”

“Yes, and they will be rather more than lovely just now! Does the name suggest nothing to your mind?”

“You think the floods will be up?” Mrs. Lewin asked startled.

“I think the Rano District will probably be impassable just now, but we will see.” His keen eyes fell on the couple in front of them, who were Mr. Gurney and Miss Denver, and he laughed. “That young lady is a puzzle to the garrison,” he said. “The women cannot decide if she is a bad lot or only a little fool.”

“It is her people’s fault. They let her ride about with the boys stationed here up to twelve at night, and she spends half her time at Mitsinjovy with Mrs. Clayton. What can you expect? Of course people talk. But I think she is quite capable of taking care of herself.”

“I don’t know. This affair with Gurney outshines her former little peccadilloes. She has the worried air of a girl who has been kissed!”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for knowing such things!” retorted Chum quickly. “Perhaps they are engaged. I know nothing of Mr. Gurney beyond his voice. He may be all right.”

“Or she may be all wrong! I would solve the mystery in three minutes—if I were a bachelor. As things are I do not feel inclined to help to satisfy public curiosity.”

“I don’t like you nearly so well when you talk scandal,” said Mrs. Lewin frankly. “And you so very seldom do it that it jars the more. The girl is not able to defend herself either. Don’t let us attack her without cause.”

There had been ample cause, in so far as a foundation for gossip went, and she knew it in her own mind, even while she defended a fellow-woman. It flashed across her, with a sense of absolute wonder, that she could not imagine such a position as Miss Denver’s—a girl accepted in the social world of the place, asked to people’s houses, and spoken of by men as Major Churton had spoken! Leoline Lewin could not quite realise the tone of mind in Beatrix Denver, if she could allow herself to be handled, not by one man only, but by many, if report spoke truly. She herself had never been kissed by any man until her engagement, and felt that she would have a certain shyness in the admission after other women’s avowed experience. It seemed rather immature, somehow. And yet the mere thought of familiarity, even in her present assured position, appeared an impossibility to her sense of self-valuation. Of course she could not soil her own self-respect by such a thing, though she kept her charity for those who were less particular. Last week, for instance, Di Churton had told her that the very Mrs. Clayton, who was Miss Denver’s chief ally at the Mitsinjovy Garrison, had got the new boy from Natal in tow. He was rather a nice youth named Rennie, as Mrs. Lewin knew him, with little harm as yet in his twenty-one years; but his education had begun in earnest.

“He runs after Mrs. Clayton everywhere,” Diana declared. “She takes him home after the dances, and he unlaces her gowns for her. Brissy Nugent told me so.”

“What a pity he didn’t stay with the first battalion in Natal,” was all Mrs. Lewin had said. But in her own mind she drew a line of demarcation between herself and Mrs. Clayton as unconsciously pharisaical as though they were of different castes. She was thinking of this now, as she rode over to Maitso, in the wake of Mr. Gurney and Miss Denver, and her mood was tolerant because she was too clear-brained to take a narrower position. These people did not really matter in hers and Ally’s lives; their vulgarity need not affect her, though she lived in touch with them for a period. By-and-by they would drop out of her existence, and she would pass on to something cleaner, unsmutched.

On the crest of the hill they joined the rest of the party, which had become gradually augmented, so that between twenty and thirty ponies turned off to the right in single file, and followed a precipitous path into the hills. A rough cart, borrowed from the garrison, and drawn by six stamping, vicious mules, had gone on ahead with the provisions, by a longer but less dangerous route. As Mrs. Lewin had predicted, the ponies had to slide when they could not walk, and the descent into the next valley was like a winding stair. To the right the steep precipice fell sheer down to a flat green bottom overgrown with logwood and guava—what the Planters called “dirty land,” because it had not been “cleaned” for sugar-cane or banana. The path was so slight a track that Major Churton, riding in front of Chum, had often to push a way for her through the eager vegetation. Above the cleft hills and the valley smiled the blue sky, washed clean by the rains, and from all sides rose the breath of the still moist earth.

“This is like riding in a vapour bath,” said Mrs. Lewin, gasping a little, as the cavalcade emerged from the trees for a moment and met the freer air of the hillside. “Major Churton, you were right—the streams are in flood!”

Her exclamation was echoed by a cry of dismay from the vanguard of the party, for the curve of the hill had revealed the impassable volume of water to them. A regular cascade, which in dry weather was nothing but a shallow stream, was tearing down the hill at a lower level, and cutting off the valley land from their advance. The string of ponies stopped, and there ensued an argument which was, of course, shouted up and down the hill as to a change of route. Here and there a pony fretted on the bit, and brought his hind legs dangerously near the edge of the track; once a woman shrieked—it was Miss Denver’s voice, pitched to an hysterical tone that made Mrs. Lewin’s pulses leap with sudden dread for her—and an occasional “Woa, boy!” “Steady, mare!” showed that somebody’s mount resented the delay. It struck Mrs. Lewin how strange the string of ponies must look from below, dotted along the hillside, and she laughed—she remembered that, too, afterwards as something uncanny. There are days on which we seem to have been too prodigal of laughter, and to have squandered it for little reason.

“Well, we must ride on and get somewhere,” said Mrs. Gilderoy’s exasperated voice at last. “There’s a way round; we must take that, and follow the cart.”

“But I told Mr. Gregory the short cut!” protested her husband blankly. “He will be sure to come this way. Will he think of the other road?”

“He must, unless he is an arrant fool,” said Mrs. Gilderoy, with refreshing candour, and no respect for the representative of the British Government. “No one can cross that stream without getting wet to the waist. We must ride on. You don’t want to wait until he turns up, I suppose?”

Some echo of the altercation passed down the line of riders and troubled the air around Mrs. Lewin. She said nothing, but a new silence seemed to have fallen upon her as Liscarton at last pricked his ears and followed his leader with obvious satisfaction. There was no fear that any one who knew the country as Gregory did would attempt impossible feats; the probability was that he might grasp the situation much sooner than they had done, and, not knowing what they had decided, turn round and go home. Mrs. Lewin’s mind felt a sudden blank; she was looking forward to meeting him to-day, after an absence of nearly a week, to catch some hint of his plans that would not yet be public property. It was still a matter of some scornful marvel to Leoline Lewin that every one round her openly lamented their lot in being bound to Key Island, for she did not realise that her own vitality was being kept up by a vivid interest. She was living much more actively in a mental fashion than she had ever done in her life before, and the island itself, that she thought the object round which her forces gathered, was in reality only a background. But as yet she felt no hint of danger.

The party camped out at last on the bank of the very stream which had hindered their progress, and which had given them an extra half-hour’s ride. The cart was awaiting them, and the men tethered the ponies and helped outspan, while the women laid the cloth. There was no kettle to boil, or tea to make, as in a cooler climate; but the ice had stood the journey well, and the soda-water and mangoes came on as cold as if served at Government House. Mrs. Lewin seated herself on a fallen tree with Major Churton’s handkerchief spread over it as a safeguard for her frills, and fell to swizzling tinned butter with milk in the interests of the company. At her feet Brissy, in an attitude as condensed as a monkey’s, was slicing salad with dangerous activity. The group was gathered on open ground beyond the absolute tangle of wood which clothed the hillside, and which was still reeking from the rains.

“Pass the spiders, please!” said Chum absently, her eyes on the back of Captain Nugent’s flat head, where the black hair curled crisply. He looked up with a laugh in the young eyes that had seen too much of this marvellous universe, and his white teeth flashed under his moustache.

“You’re dreaming, Mrs. Lewin!”

For once Chum’s control of her blood failed her, and she flushed a little, conscious that he told the truth. Her thoughts were with Gregory and his probable prudence in turning back.

“It was appropriate, anyhow!” she retorted, shaking a huge specimen off her skirts. “That’s not a tarantula, is it?”

“No; common or garden bug, I think. Let’s put it on Miss Denver’s shoulder and hear her scream!”

“No, Captain Nugent! Stop!” A sharp memory of the hysterical quality of Miss Denver’s cry on the hillside made Chum the more imperious. Even in her own mind she did not form the fear that a very little would upset the girl’s balance to make men suspicious of she knew not what; all she felt was that Miss Denver was not in a state of nerves for the endurance of spiders. There might be nothing in it, but she remembered with faint disgust Major Churton’s broad comment, “She has the worried look of a girl who has been kissed.” Mrs. Lewin dropped the subject, and the spider together, with distaste. Her mental attitude grew a little contemptuous.

The next instant she had risen silently to her feet with a nearer and more bitter interest. Some one had said, “Have a cého, Ally?”—and she threaded her way through the chattering crowd round the table-cloth to the three men standing apart by the tethered ponies, without haste, and with a complete appearance of her errand being her own need.

“Ally, do get me some soda-water!” said her voice behind her husband, as he vacillated on the brink of consent. “I can’t wait for our meal to be ready, I’m so thirsty. And don’t put anything but ice into it; it’s too hot.”

Her candid eyes met his without a shadow of reproach; yet he coloured ever so slightly, and shook his head at the man who had suggested cého. As he halved the soda-water between them, Chum felt the old humiliation sweep back over her with fresh force. Who was she to think herself and Ally above these neighbours of theirs? With this ugly possibility always dodging her steps, she was a woman who dared not leave her husband to judge for himself, but was forced to risk an interference that might be rightly interpreted at any moment! She stood there in dispirited silence, beautiful in her summer gown, but with earnest eyes that seemed out of place above the dainty muslin; and for one mad moment she could have cursed the weakness of the man beside her which had spoiled her ideal.

And it was just as she turned from him to save suspicion of her errand, that a sound of welcome arose from the group round the table-cloth.

“When did you turn up?”—“How wet you are? You must have swum the stream!”—“There’s a compliment for you, Mrs. Gilderoy—nothing would keep him away!”—“Well, you always were a man who surmounted difficulties!”

It was Gregory, and his high riding boots were dripping with water; but he laughed at the idea of cold. The pony took the stream at a point he knew of, he said; there was no danger—only a ducking, to which he was used. He had been riding all through the rains, and forded worse floods.

He was standing as Mrs. Lewin came back to the group, and remained so until she had sat down; then he took a seat near her, but rather behind her back, so that they could hardly be called companions. It would have been difficult to talk to her indeed, and she directed her conversation rather to Halton, who was facing her at a little distance. His brown eyes were very constantly on her face, and she parried their sentimentality with vague distrust. His departure was lending a new meaning to their old intimacy, and she had no room for it in her present life. Her fear for Ally, and her desire to hear if Gregory had any news, kept her mind at sufficient stretch. She enjoyed the mental activity in some strange fashion, in spite of the thread of pain running through it; but her increasing appetite for power was not fed by the sentimental half-tones of her relations with Halton.

As the conversation grew more general she was conscious of listening for a whisper behind her. Miss Denver’s laugh was loud above the rest. Some one challenged Hamilton Gurney to sing, and he affectedly refused for the sake of being pressed, but the voice he wanted did not join in the appeal. Mrs. Lewin was not conscious that they were urging him to anything in fact, for through the babel the Administrator had leaned forward and asked her for more bread and butter. She passed it back to him, and as he took it his voice breathed a whisper in her ear—

“I have heard from Capetown.”

She dared not turn her head, but her nerves seemed strung as if by a strong stimulant. He folded the bread and butter deliberately, while she still held the plate, and his voice went on rapidly—

“They have given mecarte blancheto do as I please.”

Mr. Gurney had given up the hope of any persuasion coming from Mrs. Lewin, and as he really wanted to sing, he screwed up the melancholy banjo which he had sent on in the cart, and twanged an accompaniment. The first notes fell on deaf ears as far as Leoline was concerned, for her mind buzzed with possibilities. She had never dreamed that the Capetown Government would put such power into a man’s hands which the Home Authorities had carefully tied. But she forgot how small a dot Key Island appeared to the larger State, already worried with its own affairs.Carte blanchemeant that Gregory might get to the root of the hashish trouble by burning the crops, or any other drastic measure, and this would be followed by probable consequences for which she knew some of his plans. He was nearer to the grip of his tiny kingdom, at which he aimed, than he had been two months ago. Mrs. Lewin drew her breath as if something had almost taken it away. She was excited and roused, and her blood was on fire....

Then Gurney’s voice stole in on her attention, loosening the restraint of her will-power still more in its subtle sweetness. Between the rush of two unusual emotions she felt bewildered, and clutched blindly after her usual self-control. Her eyes threatened to fill with ridiculous tears, and half-a-dozen men and women would see and misinterpret them. She flung herself a little into the shadow of a tree, leaning back with her hand on the ground behind her to support herself. It enabled her to turn her face so that she hoped it was partly masked.

“All ye who seek for pleasure,Here find it without measure—No one to sayA body nay,And naught but love and leisure!”

“All ye who seek for pleasure,

Here find it without measure—

No one to say

A body nay,

And naught but love and leisure!”

Something hotter than tears seemed to flash across Leoline Lewin’s eyeball; the universe stood still, soundless and sightless, then rushed on with clangor, and drowned every sound save the little trivial song which still tinkled so loudly in her stunned soul, ... for Evelyn Gregory had leaned back also, and laid his hand heavily over hers as it rested on the ground, out of sight of every one in the group. During the shock of the first five seconds she thought that he had done so unconsciously, and that the movement had been as natural as her own. She dared not move for fear of making him conscious, and waited for him to remove the heavy pressure that she might slide her own away, and never refer to it.... The seconds went on and on, each that passed accentuating a new beautiful terror and conviction in her mind. He did not move. Human flesh cannot press human flesh and be unconscious for so long. Her blood leapt to the revelation that they were man and woman, and felt, too, the humiliation of knowing that they were not sexless as friends.

“All ye whose hearts are achingFor somebody forsaking,We’ll hold you dearAnd heal you here,And send you home love-making!”

“All ye whose hearts are aching

For somebody forsaking,

We’ll hold you dear

And heal you here,

And send you home love-making!”

Gregory removed his hand and sat up, as self-controlled as though he had never moved. An echo down the valley faintly took up the last pure notes and repeated them afar off—

“Love-making!”

Chum drew her knees up and clasped her hands round them as though she would gather her forces together; but as she did so her eyes fell on the back of her hand, where a faint red flush marred the white skin. It told tales of the rough pressure she had endured to her maddened mind, and she dropped it again to the ground—but this time out of reach—beside her. She glanced round the ring of faces and found no answering consciousness there. They were all trying the echo—shouting nonsense up the valley on the quiet evening air. She looked at Halton, and saw that he was looking down, apparently the most abstracted person present. But with a pang of fear she wondered if she would have read knowledge in the eyes veiled by his drooped lids. She was frightened, not only for herself, but for that other behind her, her woman’s intuition recognising the danger that lay under Halton’s quiet, and with characteristic courage she walked straight up to her danger to look it in the face.

“Are you going to ride home with me, Mr. Halton?” she contrived to say, as the ponies were saddled up for the return.

“If you have made no other arrangement?” he said tentatively. There was nothing to take hold of in the words, because Major Churton had ridden with her before, and might claim the privilege again. But she caught a covert insinuation and scored up an unpaid grudge against him.

“I am not using you to escape an unwelcome cavalier!” she said, as if accepting his own idea.

“What an unpleasant suggestion! I shall be wondering all the way which man is thirsting for my blood.”

“It would be a better compliment if you took it for granted that they were all envious. You are out of practice, Mr. Halton.”

“I have had none of late.”

“Never mind; use the present opportunity on my gown!”

“It is charming, of course!” he said, as he arranged the blanket over Liscarton’s streaked shoulders, and pulled the girth tight. “And no other lady would have dared to risk it on a hot pony, would they?”

“I told my husband that I wished to leave a good impression on your mind!”

“Really? But why struggle for the inevitable? I am all the more flattered though, of course. It is not every day that a lady makes herself smart for my especial benefit.”

“Oh, please don’t!” said Chum, as she lifted herself easily into the saddle. “Smart is now a word sacred to the middle classes, to whom it means inferior silks and strings of imitation beads!”

“So bad as that?”

“Yes, really. And the same degree of cheapness is expressed in the word ‘clever’—its mental equivalent. Perhaps on the whole it is best summed up in the draper’s ideal of one and elevenpence halfpenny!”

“I am so glad you did not say three farthings!”

“We never have such things now,” sighed Mrs. Lewin. “Thereisa farthing, of course—but they are rapidly becoming relics. You get a packet of very bad pins, or a pencil that you particularly don’t want, for the odd number.”

His laugh sounded like the earlier terms of their acquaintance, and she congratulated herself on her stroke of policy in reannexing him for this occasion. Never once had her eyes met Gregory’s since that revelation during Gurney’s song, and she had not spoken to him. As they rode back through the falling dusk she fenced with Halton as of old, retreating and advancing like the figure of a mental quadrille, and was surprised to find it tedious. Had the stronger personality that was even now shadowing her made the other man seem slight, or was Halton only attractive to a certain point, after which he could only repeat himself? It seemed to her that realities had superseded the dilettantism of their brain flirtations, and made them a tiresome waste of time.

As they rode through Port Victoria, and turned off on the Government House road, she missed Ally and learned that he had ridden home with his chief, and would come on to the bungalow afterwards, doubtless.

“I saw them turn up the avenue; they were in front of us,” Halton said quietly. “Did you not see them?”

She thought he looked at her.

“I don’t always see my husband!” said Mrs. Lewin adroitly. “Life would be so fatiguing if one could not sometimes close one’s eyes, wouldn’t it?”

“Or substitute another object?” said Halton, as they drew rein. “The mail comes in to-morrow, and I expect to leave in her the day after, Mrs. Lewin. But I hope this is not good-bye?”

“I am coming to see you off, of course! I will bring you one of Ally’s pocket handkerchiefs.”

“To wave, or to weep in?”

“Whichever you prefer. Personally, I want to murder people who weep over me; but if you like it, I will imitate the late rains.”

“I would not cost you a tear!” he said, with a sudden note of feeling in his voice that vaguely surprised her. “If your future were inmyhands, there would be very little fear for it.”

He rode away into the darkness without any further farewell, while Mrs. Lewin pondered his words with a fresh misgiving. When Ally came in half-an-hour later, he told her—as he usually did when it was so—that Halton had been speaking of her.

“I hope he was admiring me!” said Chum brightly. “But he could hardly do less—to you.”

“He said you were very clever!” said Ally doubtfully. Who likes his wife to be called clever?

“One and elevenpence halfpenny!” murmured Chum absently. “I did hope I was worth two shillings, anyway.”

“And sma——”

“Ally, if you say smarttoo, I shall have Mr. Halton up for libel!” said Mrs. Lewin indignantly.

Ally laughed. “Gregory’s Powder didn’t say anything,” he remarked. “I don’t think you’ve made much impression there, in spite of your earnest efforts, you know, Chum.”

Mrs. Lewin looked down absently at the back of her hand, almost as if she expected to see something there; but her real answer came later, as she kissed her husband and said good-night.

“Ally,” she said slowly, turning back at the door, “do you mind? It’s so hot to-night! And you are restless, and have kept me awake lately!”

Alaric finished his whiskey and soda rather soberly. “Oh!” he said. “All right. I’ll sleep in the dressing-room——”

He heard Leoline enter her own room and turn the key in the lock, and he wondered in his stupid handsome head that she should so insist on privacy. Then he cheered up, had another whiskey, and supposed she had a headache. A man may distrust his mistress if she locks him out, and knows how to translate his own inclination to sleep in the dressing-room. But thetertium quidof his wife’s case is always a headache.

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