CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VII

“In vino veritas.”—Latin Proverb.

“In vino veritas.”—Latin Proverb.

The way of the Army woman is hard. She starts as a nice girl, with a weakness for red cloth and jingles; but then she marries, and discovers, amongst other shocks, what lies beneath the red cloth. Her husband may still be her ideal hero to her, or he may be merely the figure-head of a position in which she gets plenty of attention and some amusement; but his profession will inevitably take her into desert places of the earth where she samples discomfort until the iron enters into her domestic soul. If it be in India she will do pretty well, until he gets a bad Station, though even the horrors of loneliness and fever may be mitigated by obtainable service. But by the time she is suddenly transferred with him to another Colony there will be a nursery in progress, and then the tragedy—the ugly, sordid tragedy of a married life stripped of its decencies and privacies—will very possibly begin. She will leave her comfortable staff behind her, because of the Emigration Act, and on the troop-ship she will begin to taste the joys of being her own nurses and maid. Then her temper wears, and she has not quite so much time to spend over her appearance, but instinct holding good she adopts the harder and more masculine style as being easier to compass under all trials of circumstance. Foreign Stations batter the daintiness of life out of her, the narrow limits of the Army world distort her mental vision, the drawbacks she struggles to overcome leave their mark on her. Finally there comes the day when even the hateful little compensations to which she has become used have to be given up—the snobbish sense of position, and the dangling after her of men other than her husband, who find in her apasséefashion,—for the soldier’s service is over, and then comes Ealing and a dress allowance to be saved up for the sales.

Diana Churton had reached the ominous point in her career when she saw half-pay darkening the horizon. It was unlikely that Major Churton would ever be given the regiment, and, as he said, twenty years of foreign service had made the solid dullness of England a home to his weary eyes. Diana had no children to plot and plan for, and marry into the same life that she had found a dubious success; their one little girl had died at Agra, and the dumb tragedy of their lives was in the moment when they turned away from the little grave, in a city for ever sacred to the dead by that grand white memory called the Taj, and went their separate ways. The child as she grew older might have drawn them closer together again; her grave somehow thrust them apart.

“If he thinks I neglected her, or that it was my fault, I could kill him!” thought the woman fiercely, jealous of her motherhood.

“If she hints that I do care, I shall lose my control—better let the very subject alone,” thought the man, for he was afraid of his own temper.

So Di Churton dropped the remnants of her girlhood into the void of her husband’s silence, and life went on as before—always the indefinite man who rode with her and danced with her, always the hard tongues of the Station and the keeping just on the safe side, always the restless, feverish desire to get something out of life and the sense of disillusion. She never lost her husband’s confidence, for she was a wise woman; but she learned a mutual accommodation when “Bute was thick with Mrs. So-and-so.” Diana was attracted by men rather than her own sex; she was in few senses a nice woman, and unless she had an object in cultivating them, the other ladies in the garrison found her frankly rude.

At Port Victoria she was fairly intimate with Mrs. Gilderoy until the arrival of the Lewins, whereupon she transferred her preference to Leoline, not only on account of Alaric, but because Chum was obviously successful socially, and Bute was conveniently attracted. It would have suited Mrs. Churton very well to have the Lewins nearer, for the distance up to Maitso from their bungalow was a frequent reason for Mrs. Lewin to slip out of an invitation there. It happened one morning, for instance, that on a day when Diana had planned to have her company Chum rode into town late, and gave herself a headache with the heat and the exhaustion of the air. The smell of Port Victoria is peculiarly its own, and seems to be compounded of all the mixed races that inhabit it, not excepting the white, for the hot khaki certainly lends its own peculiar flavour. The humid streets do not smell of the packed stores, or of the decaying vegetation, or even of the need for drainage, though they might do so, and it is a surprise to those who know the place that they do not; but the juices of warm Chinaman and Negro and Arab and Malagasy, seem to merge and produce an effect that is numbing to the uninitiated. After six months or so in the town people declare that they hardly notice it, but Mrs. Lewin had not reached that stage. She turned Liscarton’s head towards the hillside, and felt thankful that if her homeward way was to be overscented it would be with too much sweetness rather than otherwise. For it was a characteristic of Port Victoria that its rank nastiness should be succeeded by enervating odours of flowers the minute one gets out of the streets and into the blossoming tangle of hills round about.

The town seemed unusually glaring, and clattered with khaki. The rattling by of an officer’s pony, and the salute flashed into her dazzled eyes, made Chum’s head swim, until she was faintly conscious of something else that distracted her attention from herself. It was the hour of the Miroro—the noonday sleep—and the coloured people had lounged out of store and wharf and were sitting in the gutters and on the steps of the houses, eating fessikh and dozing and playing native games. But above it and through it all rang a sing-song snarl of patois, like the complaining note of a caged beast. Liscarton almost stopped for the instinctive pressure on his rein, and Mrs. Lewin turned in her saddle to look back at the streets she was leaving. She remembered Gregory’s warning as to the signs of trouble; this sounded like it, this strange note of dissatisfaction in the general hum.

“I will speak to Ally, and ask him if there is anything fresh—any measure of the Government that is unpopular,” she thought, beginning to canter up-hill mechanically. A Key Island pony will always canter his hills, unless really tired, upon the principle that it is better to get over a difficulty quickly and breathe yourself afterwards. He is bound to be hot with the climb, and the impetus of a quicker motion carries him over the rough ground with greater ease.

As Chum entered the delicious coolness of their own bungalow, the telephone rang, and she went to answer it. Her husband’s voice spoke to her, faintly muffled.

“Who’s there?... Oh, is it you, Chum? I’m at the club, and it’s too late to come out. Brissy’s lunching with me.”

“Don’t drink too many céhos!” said Chum resignedly from her end of the communication tube. “And tell Captain Nugent I expect him to dinner to-morrow—he can bring the banjo.”

“All right. Well, look here, Chum, I’m dining with the Churtons unfortunately—they want to know if you can ride out too?”

“My head is too bad. I’m only just out from town, and the heat made it ache a good deal. I’m afraid I should be the skeleton at the feast if I attempted to get up to Maitso. It’s nothing—don’t be a silly boy! I shall have to make the effort and come to the Churtons if you bother.”

“No don’t, if you feel seedy. I’ll ride out and see how you are after lunch.”

“You are not to do anything of the kind—it’s too hot for you. Stay at the club. Oh, Ally——”

“Well?”

“Is there anything going on in the Legislature?”

“Not that I know of more than the usual—ahem!—grind. What’s up?”

“Nothing. I only thought—oh, nothing. Give my love to Di.”

“All right. Take care of yourself, dear.” Ally rang off hastily, and turned to drink cého with relief. He was not a hypocrite, and he had reached a point when he did not want Chum to send her love to Mrs. Churton.

After all, he did not ride out to their bungalow, for he talked horse with Captain Nugent to the accompaniment of many whiskies, and then it seemed too late, remembering that he had to dress—he had had his clothes sent down to the club—and get his pony and ride up to Maitso. But Brissy was not pressed for time, and offered himself as a substitute, whereby it came to pass that he turned up to have tea with Chum, and impressed her anew in her secret heart with his absolute inferiority to Ally, and the wearying vacuum of his brains.

“He is like a bad copy of Ally, too,” she thought critically, looking at the burnt face and the young eyes drawn round with spurious wrinkles by foreign service. Under the black moustache Brissy’s teeth flashed as he talked, for he had a trick of drawing back his upper lip, and above his low forehead the dark hair thatched an unusually flat head. Owing to vivid colouring, he was considered a handsome man among his fellows; but Mrs. Lewin did not admire him.

“His eyes have no soul in them—he is just a healthy animal!” she said to herself disparagingly, as he stolidly drank his fourth cup of tea and showed no signs of going. “Oh, thank Heaven, Ally is not like this! What shall I talk about?”

It seemed ridiculous to think of Brissy as a father, and Mrs. Lewin never drew him on to domestic subjects as she might other married men, partly because it struck her as inappropriate to him, and partly because there was a general belief in Key Island that he would have liked to bring his wife out with him, but that Mrs. Nugent had not been attracted by a small and dull Station such as Port Victoria, and had preferred to wait until he had something better. Brissy staunchly asserted that her health would not stand the heat, but Captain Gilderoy had shrugged his shoulders to a select audience, and given it as his opinion that at the last moment Mrs. Nugent had jibbed! The theory met with credence, and therefore Chum talked banjos and ponies rather than married interests, and had no suspicion that Brissy’s unemotional eyes strayed round the home, for which he envied “old Ally Sloper,” with a secret wistfulness. He was adding her presence at her husband’s side to the long list of advantages with which he had already endowed her, while she privately decided that a lifelongtête-à-têtewith Bristow Nugent would exhaust the vitality of any woman, and that Mrs. Nugent’s absence needed no explanation to a sympathetic mind.

Her thoughts touched Ally with fonder appreciation in contrast. He was at the moment just riding leisurely up the winding road that led to Maitso,—a handsome fellow, and well contented with himself, and his wife with him. On his right rose the solid buildings of the Mess, and as the path swung over the hill, corkscrew-wise, the dotted barracks grouped themselves on either hand. It was like a town in itself, intersected with the irrepressible vegetation which broke out into guava and logwood brush even here. Maitso looked “greener” and more deserving of its name than it really was from the town; but as Captain Lewin rode up to the Churtons’ quarters, he passed through the slight screen of logwood, and was shielded from the setting sun.

“Come in, Ally. Bute’s somewhere at the Mess,” said Mrs. Churton, appearing on the stoep. “Where’s Chum?”

“She had a headache—said she was awfully sorry she didn’t feel up to coming. I’m glad she didn’t try, it was so hot riding up.”

“I’m sorry she couldn’t, though, as we shall be odd numbers. Poor old fellow! you are hot! Will you have a cého or whiskey?” Diana was hospitable.

Ally chose cého, but the whiskey followed, and when the Major appeared they had more, sitting out until dinner-time and talking in a desultory fashion, while they watched the sky darken behind the solemn fans of the ravenalas. How hot it was! Even up at Maitso the freshness seemed to have been melted from the sea breeze before it reached them, and the heavy air clung like a miasma. It was intoxicatingly sweet, but languid and enervating until the beads of sweat stood on the men’s temples without more exertion than their own vitality, and even Diana Churton gasped.

“By Jove! it’s been a swilling day!” Major Churton remarked, as he stretched his hand for the whiskey. “My throat feels like blotting-paper. Have some more, Lewin?”

“Thanks!”

There were no ladies present at dinner besides Di, but two men from Mitsinjovy dropped in, and presently they played Poker. Ally was one of the winners, but more by luck than judgment, for the heat—or something else—seemed to be making his head heavy. Twice he thought he got up to go, and then some one said the night was yet young, and his limbs felt comfortably indisposed to bestir themselves. When midnight struck he dragged himself to his feet with a feeling of bewilderment.

“Great Scot! Chum will think I’m killed—had a headache, too, poor little soul!” he said vaguely. His splendid, vacant face was turned to the hot night beyond the open doors; he was wondering how he should ever get down that winding hill in the dark with this stupid feeling in his brain. He must trust to the pony, it was no good worrying.

Diana beckoned him imperiously on to the stoep, and he obeyed, pulling himself together and walking straight, without control of his own body, it seemed, into the cooler night air. She was holding one of the big Mess tumblers, with the Wessex crest on it, sparkling with whiskey and soda, and deliciously cold with ice.

“A stirrup cup!” she said hurriedly. “Come, you must drink it! You are sleepy with the heat of the rooms. This will brace you up to get home.”

“Upon my word, Di, I’ve had enough.”

But she laughed and lifted it to his lips for him, and his hand closed on hers and the glass together. Ally was smoking, but he took the cigar from his lips as if he wondered what to do with it, and Mrs. Churton held it for him while he drank, sniffing it appreciatively. To some women the smell of smoke is a kind of lurid dissipation. The taste of tobacco in their own mouths is not nearly so suggestive to them. Ally finished the whiskey, and then something happened. He did not seem able to hold the glass, and it fell and smashed at his feet. He was troubled, because it belonged to the Mess, and those glasses were expensive things, and had to be made in England; but Mrs. Churton coolly kicked the fragments out of the way, and said it did not matter. At least the whiskey had not been wasted!

How dark it was on the stoep, and how hot and still! Up in the further corner no one could see them from the lighted room. He remembered nothing of getting there, only that her face looked softer than usual in the little light there was; and when she put her cool hands behind his head and kissed him, he felt a sly amusement that she should be so much more keen than he; there was a passion in her kisses, while there was none, he thought, in his. And her voice rang in his ears, “Ally! Ally! come to me when other women fail you!” while he wondered that it seemed to mean nothing. He was far more conscious of the outspread fans of the ravenalas, as if they would fain screen him from the night.

Some one brought his pony round then, and he mounted, surprised it was so easy, and turned the brute’s head down the slope. Their voices echoed after him and died away on the stillness of the air, bidding him good-night, chaffing him noisily, confusing the way he was going. It was impossible to judge one building from another now, and the damned paths wound round and round like a maze. He should take a wrong turning—no, this was safer! He drove his spurs into his pony’s flanks and tore down the hill at a gallop, holding the animal mechanically from stumbling, but trusting to his instinct to get down safely. Why they did not pitch down the steep slopes he did not know, but he was not in the least afraid; a mad exhilaration took hold of him through the wild ride, and he urged the pony on still when he got to the foot of the hill, and clattered through the sleeping town, but the pony knew his way home. Stumbling and dripping with sweat, man and horse galloped the last few yards, and swept up to the very stable door, where the pony stopped with falling head and streaming flanks.

Ally slipped out of the saddle, feeling his mount vaguely, and trying to find the words to explain that he was to be rubbed down and handled carefully, but they would not come, and he gave the rein in silence to a sleepy sais, who seemed to have risen out of the shadows of the stoep. A minute later his voice came back in a curse, for he tripped over the bodies of his own servants crouched close to the cool stones. There were more than the men of his household there, but he did not know. He fumbled at the door, got it unlatched, and reeling over to his dressing-room, dropped like a stone on to the floor in the middle of the room.

The heat of the night had prevented Chum from sleeping at first, and though her headache had driven her to bed early, she had lain there for an hour looking up at the white fall of the mosquito curtain, and listening to the stupid bustle of a hard-back who had drifted in from the outside world in company with a dozen moths, and was floundering to find his way out again. She fell asleep at last listening for Ally’s pony to come up the hill, and was in a deep slumber when the bang of a door shook her awake as completely as if she had never closed her eyes. She sat up in bed, wondering what had happened, and listening to some one who seemed to be strange to the house, and was trying to find his way about. A man must have got in, and she was all alone; yet the boldness of the intruder’s movements as regarded noise, and his lack of caution, were very unlike the stealthiness of the coloured thief. At last the steps found Ally’s dressing-room, and passed in. There was an instant’s pause, a heavy fall, and silence.

Mrs. Lewin was standing at the closed door between the two rooms almost before the sound had ceased; she had no knowledge of how she came there, or of how her fingers let down the rattling shutter with some vague idea of seeing through the opened slits. But there was darkness in the dressing-room, and she opened the door with one hand and switched on the electric light with the other, even as she passed in. Nothing had been touched from the time when she last saw Ally’s man putting it in order that morning. His master having dressed at the club, the place had had an air of lonely neatness all day, for Ally was regally careless how he flung his clothes about when present. Mrs. Lewin took a step forward and almost trod upon his prostrate body before she saw that the heavy dark something in the middle of the floor was a man.

He was lying nearly on his back, having turned in his fall with an instinctive effort towards the air. She dropped on her knees beside him, her heart beating heavily with the remembrance that the nearest doctor was half-an-hour’s ride away, and trying to think what one did for a fit. He was breathing heavily, and his face was flushed and heated. She bent down to wrench open the soaked collar ... and drew back with a choking breath.

Leoline Lewin had seen drunken men before—labourers, lying on alehouse benches, or in the sun; ragged wretches soaked in gin to drown their misery, and slinking past the police. She had heard stories, too, of her own male acquaintance being overcome upon occasion, and had found them funny enough to laugh at as told by their friends. But the real experience had never touched her before, nor had she seen the man who had always stood upright, to her imagination at least, suddenly cast from his dignity to grovel on the earth from which he came.

In the revulsion of the shock she stood very upright herself, as if to prove her own power—a grave, white figure overlooking the relaxed body in its tumbled dress-clothes which lay at her bare feet. Through the appalling silence sounded the man’s heavy snoring breath, and the thrum of the hard-back which had followed her into the dressing-room, and was hitting itself against the beams of the ceiling.

Suddenly the woman remembered where and who she was, and what had happened. The little harassing details of the tragedy came back to her and woke her to shuddering action. She had been standing there for some minutes, and half-a-dozen dangers might have occurred to clench the position. The servants might hear and come to ask what was wrong, or some one might have followed Ally to see him safely home, though a quick glance at the probabilities reassured her that this—this prostrate helpless body, was a last stage that had not betrayed itself before. She sprang at the door and closed it swiftly, slipping the bolt; then she dragged the mattress off the couch and pushed it as near that helpless thing, that seemed no longer her husband, as was possible; and then, with her strong, young arms, she took it under the shoulders and dragged it on to the improvised bed, spreading a covering sheet over the betraying clothes. The exertion brought beads of moisture on to her fair soft body, and she stood up again panting a little, and trying to realise it all.

She must begin and love all over again, if she were to love so low at all. This degraded Ally, helpless on her mercy, was no longer the stalwart husband round whom she had built up her theoretical married life. A dozen little things that had been but pinpricks of annoyance started up in her mind suddenly, to intensify the final blow, and she saw him as a weak man, without the strenuous love of fighting and winning which she had tried to coax into him, self-contented, the mere tool of her own ambition whenever he had been forced into action. The bitterness of her thwarted instincts was uppermost as she turned away. That was the mate of her own ripe womanhood, the force round which her eager life was to centre—that poor weak nature which would resist one temptation as little as another, for in the cruelty of this revelation she acknowledged what she had been so pitifully denying to herself,—that Alaric Lewin was no master of life, but the sport of his own idle inclinations.

She was moving back to her own room with dragging feet, when a new terror seemed to spring up and startle her back into action again. Some one was coming up the garden path with a heavy tramp that came straight on towards the stoep and the house. It was no barefooted Arab, but the impatient tread of a white man who was his own messenger, and with a horrible premonition she knew it from any more probable one that it might have been. It was the Administrator, and he had some purpose in thus coming to his Secretary at one o’clock in the morning. The sing-song snarl outside the stores and in the gutters, during the Miroro, came back to her mind ominously.

With some idea of stopping him before he could rouse the servants to get into the house, she hastily left the dressing-room, and closing the door behind her, as if it held an ugly secret, she sped across the large bare dining-room and slipped back the bolt of the rough wooden door. But she need not have troubled herself for the household. Evelyn Gregory had almost brushed against the sleeping Arabs in his rapid transit from the garden gate to the house, but as he passed along the stoep he coolly stepped over the slumbering tangle at his feet with the briefest passing scorn for men and women. It meant nothing to him in his absorption, and indeed he hardly knew that the humanity he spurned with his foot was there. He did not expect any of the servants to answer his knock, but he meant to rouse Captain Lewin, and with this grim intent he swung his heavy riding-whip round and brought the weighted end rattling down on the slight panels of the door. The whip was his constant companion, and served not for his ponies, but as a weapon of defence or of punishment in an emergency. Its weight was consequently no slight one, but before he could shake the door again it was quietly opened, leaving him with the upraised whip in his hand, the long lash coiled round his wrist, and his whole attitude unintentionally threatening.

In the doorway stood a marvellous fair woman in her nightdress, the open neck showing her so warm and white, that with a little instant thrill he guessed at the delicious shoulder under the lace. She had come so swiftly that she had not even drawn the white silk wrapper closely round her, and one little slipper had fallen from her; he saw it lying in the waste of floor behind her, where it had slipped from her running foot, and he thought of another white satin morsel that he had held between his own. The coil of her hair was tossed sideways over her shoulder, and brushed away from her forehead, leaving her unusually girlish without its customary mature dressing, but in her large eyes he saw that there was not the least thought of him. She was as unconscious of her sweet bare foot as of his cognizance of it, nor did she know that her careless whiteness was a seduction in itself. All her conscious life centred round the terror of the last few minutes, so that she saw only the situation she had to face.

“Come in, Mr. Gregory,” she said under her breath, drawing aside for him to pass in. “What is it?Whatis it? Something is wrong!”

She had turned on the light as she came, and it shone in their two faces, the man still struggling with his personal thought, the woman strained by her private dread of discovery. But the light mechanically influenced her, so that she put up a slight hand and tugged at the silk wrapper vaguely to veil her laces and frills. He watched her as if fascinated, without will-power to turn away, and when he spoke it was in short clipped phrases, as though it were an effort.

“There is a threatening of a rising. The police are out. I want the troops ready. Will you call your husband?”

There was a blank of silence, while it beat into her brain that somebody was required to ride to Maitso and take the alarm. She thought of a dull figure lying heavily on the floor, breathing stentoriously....

“Captain Lewin was very late in coming home. He is sleeping heavily. I am afraid it will take some time to rouse him,” she heard her own voice saying, in sentences as concise as his. “Would it not be better to send one of the men? I can call them in a moment.”

She turned towards the door, but his outstretched hand guided her back without his having moved a step.

“I’ll rouse him!” he said grimly. “Which is his room?”

There was a touch of resentment in him, which he himself did not know was there, that this heavy sleeper owned the woman before him. A man should sleep lightly with her near by, nor ever lose his happy consciousness of her even in sleep. There was something gross in the suggestion of her husband’s heavy slumber.

“Where is Captain Lewin?” he said curtly.

Again she saw in her brain the quiet, orderly room, the degraded figure, the drunken lethargy that no imperious summons would break. Here was Ally’s chance, and he had tossed it away for a momentary self-indulgence. She felt in her bitter impotence that his whole life might be squandered after such a fashion, for where was her confidence now?

And the Administrator was waiting.

“He is very tired,” she repeated dully, looking up at Gregory’s sinister height with eyes which had grown piteous. It seemed to her as if the foundations of the man were made of granite, and she were hurling herself against them vainly.

Something in her face seemed to strike him, however, for he bent a little nearer to her, and looked almost curiously in her face.

“Is he ill?” he said; and the suppressed tones of his voice were a mere vibration.

She paused, with a lightning review of such a lie and its efficacy.

“Yes,” she said in a low voice, her shamed eyes dropping from his. “I think—it is—a touch of fever.” Then in a tone which did not realise its own despair, “Icannotrouse him!”

He stepped back with a long breath, and turned his face from her for a minute, as if listening to something afar off. She heard his chest rise and fall with an extra sense that was not hearing, and realised that he understood. All the sting and shame that had gone before seemed to be nothing in comparison to that moment. He knew, and he was a hard man who gave no second chances. Alaric Lewin was a failure to his judgment; not because he had got drunk on a hot night, which was nothing, but because he was useless in an emergency. The cause was little to a mind like Gregory’s, but the weakness that might fail him again was unforgivable. He had the reputation of sweeping such men from his path as useless, without enmity, but without pity. The hopelessness of it all!

Suddenly she heard him speaking, and the whispering voice had a new kindness; he spoke gently, as if to some small frail thing that must not be hurt.

“Never mind—don’t try and wake him. I’ll go myself. Don’t worry. Go to bed and rest. It will be all right.”

He laid a large hand on her shoulder, as if to impress the words; she hardly noticed the action, but felt a dull surprise when he as quickly drew it back. The man was nothing to her, but a sudden glow of comfort sprang up in her heart at his last sentence. If he said it would be all right, he meant his own coadjutancy to make it so. She felt the power of his will, but not of his manhood, and her face was broken into softness as she turned it to him in farewell, and opened the door for his hasty departure.

“Good-night,” he repeated. “Don’t worry; go to bed yourself, and be quite easy. I am so sorry to have roused you.” There was a touch of mastery in his voice, as if he had taken possession of the situation to heal her physical and mental weariness. She rested on it unconsciously, with the woman’s craving for the strong man who shall not fail her. And Ally, alas, had failed!

As Gregory swung back along the stoep he looked down, consciously this time, at the sleeping Arabs, and there was interest and a secret sympathy in his heart. For the touch of the Eternal Feminine was on him, and he remembered that to love a woman was a goodly thing. His footsteps died away into the darkness of the garden, to the gate where he had tied his pony, and then after a pause came the sound of galloping hoofs as he rode off on his own errand. Mrs. Lewin heard it as she stood at the open shutters of her own window, for she had mechanically gone back to her room, and leaned there conscious of nothing but a horrible reaction from the tensity of the past few minutes. With a primeval instinct she turned from the shelter which civilisation has raised over men’s heads to the healing of the outside world, for she had a restless craving to get away from the confinement of the house and the ugly thing of which she knew in the next room.

The night was quick with fireflies, and the air was soft and warm to touch. Some winged thing sailed lazily by and made her start by the whirr of its heavy body close to her hair—a giant moth it seemed, with a barrel-like body and wings like a dragon-fly’s. Down below on the stoep the Arabs lay asleep.... She pressed her hands over her wakeful eyes and tried not to sob, schooling herself because she was a woman—not a child who cries away the bitterness over a broken toy. This was more serious than a toy, and yet it seemed just like an old unreasonable nursery grief, that fretted for a thing it had endowed with spurious life.

She must begin and love all over again. There was no stronger nature above her to look up to and lean on in fancy, even though she guided by her brighter wits and keener vitality. She had cheated herself happily in thinking that Ally was really the moving spirit in their married life, and that he had a reserve of strength upon which she could lean in an emergency. He was nothing but a weak man, who must be shielded before the world, and watched and helped with tenderest care, but never more looked up to at quite the same height. No one should know or guess that he had so fallen; she would not even have to make excuses for him, she would manage so cleverly, for that was her new phase of wifehood. Even as the thought crossed her mind she turned her head nervously and listened, fancying that the servants were awake and coming to ask who her late visitor had been. If she could only keep it from them till the morning, things would look more natural. Captain Lewin had slept in the dressing-room not to awaken her—he had thrown the mattress on the floor and lay there in hope of greater coolness. There was more draught on the floor—at least she could make it appear so. She went over the details in feverish haste, shielding and managing already with a woman’s tragic skill. But that it should have to be so!

Back on her mind flashed the damning certainty that the one man who should have been ignorant had found out. She had felt his knowledge through the horrible pause after her stammering excuse, through his courteous sparing of her, and quick substitution of himself as a messenger, through the kindly fall of his hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t worry; go to bed yourself, and be quite easy. I will make it all right. I am so sorry to have roused you.”

She had his promise then to make it all right. Yes, he could gloss it over too,—he would take the onus of the situation on himself, and thrust his own known energy and personal supervision in the face of comment. At least her success with him had brought her that—enough interest in herself to make him spare her husband, for she acknowledged boldly to herself that it was her own handling of this man during the past few weeks which had saved the situation to-night. Yesterday she might have daintily skirted the truth, but it seemed a small thing beside the bitter failure of her most intimate life. Gregory would spare Ally for his wife’s sake, but—the Administrator having to ride to Maitso in place of his own A.D.C.! She almost laughed aloud with a sudden hysterical sense of humour.

“Oh, I shall go mad—mad!” she said desperately, as the keenness of the humiliation stung her afresh. “It is all spoilt—all that I planned and worked to do. There is nothing but the Man left to me.”

But with the word the bitterness passed as swiftly as it had come. The Man was left her, to guard and cherish if no longer to love, honour, and obey, for the positions were reversed. Her eyes filled with lovely tears, and all that was best and most maternal flooded the soreness from her heart. She could begin and love all over again—love as one loves a child, without looking for adequate return, less selfishly than a wife her husband; she could be strong for him, and putting her own craving for protection on one side, thrust her strength between his weakness and what life had to offer. Her very first trial would begin to-morrow, when she cringed to think of the shame awaiting his returning consciousness. She must help him through that first, and then arm him for the result of his folly with the world at large.

Leoline Lewin turned from the window, and quietly throwing off her wrapper, lay down on the bed and went as fast to sleep as if nothing had disturbed her rest. Part of her theory of life had been torn from her, and the sting of keen experience had wounded her into quicker life. But she was turning her face bravely to meet it, and stood up under the new stress of life to prove her womanhood.

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