The Vicar was suffering—almost as much as he had suffered the night that Helen, his wife, had died—and because he was suffering he dressed his fine cameo-like face in its sunniest smile. That was his way—part of his creed-of-daily-life, an intrinsic part of his self.

A godly man, in the sweetest and strongest senses of that overused word, Philip Reynolds had a wholesome flair for the things of earth that both mellow human life and give it a tang. He liked his dinner, and he liked it good. He loved his roses, and he was vastly proud of his turnips. His modest cellar was admirably stocked. He enjoyed the logs that burned and glowed on his wide hearths. He was fond of his books—both inside and out. If he found a newly purchased book (he subscribed to no library) little worth reading, he discarded it. He gave it away, if he held it harmless; if he thought it a hurtful volume, he burned it. But his taste was broad, and his charity—to books as well as to people—was wide. He played a good hand of bridge—though Lucilla, his girl, played even a better. But he could beat the county at whist, and most of it at chess. He still could give a crack tennis player a game, and he could ride neck and neck with the next—and so could Lucilla.

But all these things were so much to him only because they that he loved were so greatly more. There were four big human loves in his being and keeping. Three whom he loved were out in the churchyard—only one, Lucilla, still lived. But he loved the three as actively now as he had when they had been here in the vicarage with him. And the creature things he cared for and cultivated—wine, food, games, flowers, books—he cared for and appreciated most because he associated them with the beings of his strong living love: his mother, his wife, Jack, his boy, and Lucilla, his daughter.

He had one great friendship, and two or three more moderate, but staunch and warm. His great friendship was with God. It amounted to reverent intimacy. He felt more quickly alive to God’s nearness than to that of most human creatures. His friendship with God filled his life. But his human loves filled his heart. Philip Reynolds loved his God, and obeyed Him loyally and gladly. But he knew that his love for the three in the churchyard, and the girl whom he was giving up to another to-morrow was a more passionate thing than the devoted affection he gave to his Maker and Master. And he dared to think this no offense to the Supreme. God who had granted them to him understood and did not blame, he thought.

He had no doubt of God’s personal existence, and never had had. As a little child he had believed implicitly because his mother did, and as he grew older, and came to live—as we all, even the most heart-bound and interknit with close human intimacies must—a life somewhat of his own, all that he saw, experienced, and came to think added a strong and vivid conviction, a reasoned and constantly augmented conviction, to what had been just acceptance and credulity. Everything convinced him that there was a God, a gracious, humane and intensely personal God, in whose image all men were made. The marvelous, masterly plan of the universe, the exquisite creation of flowers, the flight and the song of birds, the fitness and interfitting of all natural and unspoiled things, the unerring instincts of animal life and of the vegetable world—instincts of reproduction and of self-defending; these and a myriad other daily “miracles” convinced him of a Master Workman omnipotent and very near; gave him a conviction which never could be shaken or threatened—an invincible, glowing, grateful faith. And it was his strength. But his human loves were his inspiration; they flowed through his being like rare wine in his veins, they colored his life, sparkled his thought, and perfumed his world. He knew God, and worshiped Him, and gave Him a beautiful friendship. But his love, as he understood “love”—life’s earthly stimulant and elixir—was for the three in the churchyard and for the girl their going had left with him behind them.

A son never had loved a mother more than Philip Reynolds had loved his; but she held the fourth place in his heart. Helen, his wife, had held the first, and after her he had loved Jack, their boy. Jack had died almost immediately after Helen’s death, and Reynolds, because he so exquisitely and deeply loved Helen, rejoiced more than he grieved. He was glad to have Jack forever safe in their Father-God’s keeping, radiantly glad that Helen should have the boy’s companionship and keeping in that near Heaven where she waited his coming. The parishioners marveled at their Vicar’s sunny serenity close on the loss of his only son; one or two questioned it, even, not too approvingly. Other priests held it his very great “grace.” But they were wrong, for it was no saintship, but simply the supreme sincerity of his love of his wife, making him glad to give to her what he most of all things would have wished to keep for himself: the daily and constant companionship of Jack. And yet—were they wrong after all? Surely to love as this man loved is “grace,” a grace unto the grace of the Kingdom of Heaven.

His wife, his son, and his mother were as much an active part of his daily life to-day as they ever had been; and Jack, the last to be laid there, had lain in the old Surrey churchyard a full score of years. Each day he went to their graves which no hand but his ever tended—it was not far to go; only across the narrow country road—saw that their flowers were fresh, and the bleakest winter’s day they had their flowers, and passed on in to pray in the church where his mother and he and Jack had been christened, and where his mother and Helen and he had been married—then back to his home and his people, his tireless, gentle ministering to good and to sinful, his sipping of good wine, his reading of books, his games and his writing, and his care of Lucilla.

He could not remember his father; for the father had “gone down with his ship” when Philip had been but a baby; and Lucilla could remember neither her mother nor brother; for they had died when she was not three.

Helen Reynolds was still remembered in the parish for her pretty face, and her soft kind ways—remembered as “a nice little thing” with the best heart in the world, but no special strength of mind or of will.

But that had not been so. Few women have ever had a stronger will, and even fewer a more capable mind. Her intense gentleness had been a dignity, not weakness. An entirely happy life had left her will unruffled, and her really fine mind had been homekeeping, a trifle proud, and more than a trifle scornful of the mental equipments—outside of the vicarage itself—about her. A great many rich and leisured people—quite a few of them with minor titles—had smart country establishments in the purlieus of her husband’s parish, but they were not intellectuals, they read more novels than quarterlies, attended more race-meetings than academic lectures, were more steeped in fashions than in philosophies, and the village folk were true to type, self-seeking, self-absorbed, gossipy, curious, ordinary. They read the Surrey Comet—some of them sometimes—abused the weather, asked alms directly or indirectly, but industriously, of Vicar and Squire, and took a keen rather than gracious interest in each other’s births and marriages, ups and downs, debts and earnings, shortcomings and Sunday dinners. They had not interested Helen Reynolds; which was not altogether to their disadvantage. For the Vicar’s wife had a shrewder gift of analysis than the Vicar had. He saw chiefly the good in every one. She saw the bad, as quickly and surely as she did the good; and her sense of justice leaned to severity rather than to mercy. She had been as devoted to Philip as he to her. But he had deserved it. A faulty husband would have had short shrift with Helen Reynolds, whose “sweetly pretty” face and soft, rippling, girlish hair enhoused a relentless judgment, an exigeant taste and unwavering determination. But she had a sweet, sunny spirit and a quick, bubbling sense of humor. She rarely smiled, but she laughed fairly often. And her wit was both pretty and trenchant.

The Vicar never made a joke in his life, and never failed to see one—and, if it really was good, never failed to enjoy it greatly.

There was more lion, more indomitability, in wife than in husband, but they were excellently matched in tastes, culture and breeding; and their comradeship had been “perfect and entire, wanting nothing.” And death did not separate them.

The daughter of such parents and of such a marriage came into life with fine equipment. She had her mother’s mind, the good taste of the two, a person less “pretty,” more distinguished than her mother’s. She had her mother’s cool, clear head, her father’s big, loyal heart, her mother’s sharp eyes, her father’s fine, firm hand on bridle or reins. She had his genial liking of people, his love of fun, her mother’s resentment of all that offended her taste, the tireless limbs of them both, the flair of adventure and travel that they had shared almost equally. She was fearless and exquisitely bred.

Philip Reynolds had traveled much in his younger days, and he still roamed the world—in his study and in the easy chair by the drawing-room fire. But since his wife’s death he had not spent a night out of the sleeping-room that had also been hers. He still loved to travel—with the book on his knee; but not for all the wonder-spots of earth would he have foregone even once his daily tryst at the graves in the churchyard.

Lucilla Reynolds always had longed to travel, but had done it but little. For her own sake her father had been unwilling to spare her—for they had few relatives, and none to whom he cared to entrust his girl often. But he was relinquishing her now. And she was going to travel far. For Captain Crespin’s regiment was stationed in India. And they were to be married to-morrow, Antony Crespin and Lucilla Reynolds.

CHAPTER II

The Vicar was suffering acutely. He knew he’d miss his daughter. And he thought he should not see her again after to-morrow’s parting. So he went into the breakfast-room, where he knew she’d be waiting for him as she always was, wearing his brightest face. No shadow of his making should dim the child’s last day at home with her father. There would be time enough—all the rest of his life—to miss her in, and he did not intend to do it to-day, in the least, or to anticipate it. This should be a day of great and unbroken joy. And he didn’t intend to mope after she’d gone. Not he! He had the churchyard, his people to shepherd, the flowers in his garden, and good-fellow books on his shelves, and his one great Friendship. And he was brave.

It was hard to let the child go—that of course—but the way of her going contented him well. From the hour of her birth he had prayed that Lucilla might marry. The new dispensation that made life so much more interesting and varied for unmarried women had his cordial endorsement, because it did, as he judged, make the world a pleasanter place for an unmarried woman; but he was profoundly and acutely sure that marriage was for every woman “the better part,” and in the increasing preponderance of women to-day, making marriage a mathematical impossibility for so awkwardly many, his prayer that his girl should marry took on an unplacid quality of anxiety, almost a certain feverishness that he owned to himself was less than becoming to so spiritual an act as prayer.

He was glad when love found Lucilla out, and marriage beckoned and claimed her. He liked and approved Antony Crespin. And he rejoiced that her marriage was to take so far afield the daughter whose actual presence he could so ill spare, and would, he knew, so sorely miss. He knew that she—for all her sweet and unaffected happiness in it—had begun to find the quiet, beaten Surrey path a trifle tame, a little same and narrow. Because she was going so far, he thought that he should not see her again; but he was glad that she was. India would fascinate her, he thought; and the army life would amuse her. And of her happiness and welfare he had no doubt; for Crespin was good all through, a sterling, capable fellow, and Lucilla herself was as sane and sensible as she was true and sweet. Antony had beyond his Captain’s beggarly pay, though a bit less beggarly in an Indian regiment, of course, a decent private income; not too much, but just enough. The prayer of Agar would be answered for the husband and wife, and Philip Reynolds was sure that “Grant me neither poverty nor riches” was one of the most sensible petitions ever lifted up to God by man. Yes—it was a good match in every sense. And, if to-morrow would be one of his sharp sorrow-days, it too would be one of his gladdest.

Lucilla stood quietly radiant waiting for him at the breakfast table.

“Well, Daddy?” she said.

“Well, dear?”

“Sleep well?”

“Capitally! Capitally!”

It was their usual morning greeting. Then he kissed her, and she kissed him, as kindly and gently as he had in that same room, on that same spot every morning for years—but no more warmly, no more lingeringly than they always had; with no added significance. Each had resolved that to-day should be just like other days of theirs, to be cherished in memory all the more tenderly because it had been just one of their days of ordinary intimacy. And, though nothing had been said between them, each knew that they shared the wish and the intention.

Her boxes were packed and locked—all packed, all locked, but the one into which her wedding white would be laid when she came back from church to-morrow. All that he had to say to her, advice, careful words about marriage and about India, some of it said for himself, some said in her mother’s stead, assurances that he would do capitally, capitally without her, promises to neglect neither her collie nor her carnations—all this had been said. None of it need be said again. Nothing should be allowed to mark this day from the many other good days they had shared together—except that each had told the parlor-maid privately that they would be at home to no one to-day—if any one had the ill tact to call; and as for the villagers, well, if any parishioners were in sudden trouble or sickness they must shift with the curate for once.

Not even Antony Crespin was to have admittance to-day, Lucilla had told him, and Crespin had laughed, and understood, with a tender look in his pleasant eyes, and had promised obedience with a cheerful “Right-o!”

The girl gave her father his coffee, and he gave her her kidneys.

She teased him a little when his cup came back the second time, and he retorted with a reminder of what it probably had cost when she helped herself to a second peach.

For more than an hour they strolled in the garden, as they always did when it was fine, and often, though more briskly and briefly, when it rained. They studied the roses and appraised the peas, counted the chickens just hatched—one perking about with a white bubble of shell still on its soft yellow back—praised the red wealth of the strawberry beds, shook their heads at a pear tree’s blight; but nothing was said of that they would not do it together again. All over the garden they wandered, her hand on his sleeve, or his on hers; but they did this almost every day.

When they went in he read his paper and she read hers.

After lunch they went back into the garden, he with a book, she with some sewing, and under the big cedar just outside the drawing-room’s open French window he sat in the big garden chair and read aloud, while she sat on the big bench and worked.

She played to him after tea. Then he read her the sermon he’d finished the night before while she and Antony had roamed the garden, and Lucilla made a suggestion or two—as she often did, more because she knew he liked her to than for anymore critical reason—and one suggestion he liked and incorporated, and one he disdained and rejected.

They had a fire in the hall that night, as they always did when its heat possibly could be borne. He won the game of cribbage; he usually did. Then she sat on the wide hearth-curb, leaning back against the ingle-nook’s paneling, her palms behind her head, and he lounged in his great cushioned chair, and their lazy talk moved back and forth from grave to gay.

The grandfather’s clock struck eleven. The Vicar got up and wound it, she standing beside him. Then without a word he kissed her goodnight, and patted her shoulder, and she kissed him, and said, “Till breakfast, Daddy. Remember to put this light out,” and went up the broad, old stairs, her pale dinner-gown trailing softly behind her. And her father stood and watched her—not moving until he had heard her bedroom door close.

Lucilla Reynolds closed her door—alone with the thoughts that such girls think on such nights.

And the man sat alone by the fire till it died.

CHAPTER III

Out on the ocean Lucilla Crespin missed her father more than he, alone now in the vicarage, missed her. He had been bereaved too often to feel overwhelming or insupportable shock from bereavement, and he was at home with his house, his books, his garden, his people, his usual work and his usual pastimes, with his church and his churchyard—and, above all, at home with himself.

Lucilla was scarcely at home yet with her new self—that was the chief difference—and she was out on the new, unbeaten paths now, crossing the wide world, alone on the ocean, alone for the rest of the long years to come with a stranger—a devoted and perfectly charming stranger, who loved her amazingly, and whom she loved excitingly—but a stranger. She had felt so closely acquainted with her lover, even before he had spoken his love, but she found that she felt oddly and shyly unacquainted with her husband. It was fascinating, the queer strangeness she felt, and it made the smallest, ordinary, everyday things wonderful, almost hairbreadth-escape adventure—changing her shoes, fastening a blouse, winding her watch, washing her hands. But it was a strangeness. Antony was wonderfully good to her, beautifully considerate. She found something new to like in him every day, and discovered, almost as often, some unexpected trait or attainment to admire. She told him so shyly one evening, and he laughed with his face against hers.

“‘’Tis not a year or two shows us a man,’” he told her teasingly.

And, “So I begin to suspect,” his wife retorted.

She was very happy. The ocean and the sky above it did not seem large enough to hold her happiness; and, as for her own heart, it ached sometimes with the throb and the crowding of her hew joy. But she missed her father sorely, and each mile farther from England she missed him the more.

The boat was full of Anglo-Indians, of course, a few going out for the first time to take up new appointments, boys with their first commissions, men exchanging into Indian regiments, civil servants; but for the most, service folk and civil servants returning from leave. Lucilla noticed that they grumbled a deal at the heat and the “grind” they were going back to, but it seemed to her as she listened, keenly interested in even stray words that might tell her something of the new world in which she was going to live, that their grumbling was more a convention than a sincerity, and that they one and all were looking forward to India as what one happy-faced subaltern frankly called it, “a jolly good spree—what.” There were two or three globe-trotters aboard, an isolated and cold-shouldered missionary, and three or four business men. But these scarcely tinged the gathering, for none of them in the least penetrated into the “service” fold. It was almost a secret society the “service” people formed, she found; and certainly a jealously kept and guarded caste, and the army people sat on the higher seats.

If Mrs. Crespin was proud of her good-looking, soldierly husband, Captain Crespin was openly vain of his tall, handsome, girlish wife. And because he was vain of her he genially encouraged the acquaintance that soon buzzed about her.

The women admired her frocks, and the men admired her eyes and the way she walked, and both women and men liked her for her fresh girlishness. And, if some of the women envied her it, not one of them did it cattishly; and several, already sallowed from long Indian years, pitied her too, knowing that what India had done to their skins it probably would do to hers. And it takes a very sour woman, and a woman a little bad at core, to feel unkindness towards a bride.

Lucilla Crespin looked younger than her twenty years, and, tall as she was, securely as she carried herself, girlishness was her most instantly and insistently obvious point. Many a country priest’s motherless daughter—especially an only daughter—looks and seems very much older than her years. But in no sense had Mrs. Crespin ever been “her father’s curate,” or the villagers’ “mother.” Parochial administration and fad-philanthropy had never attracted her, and she had firmly left them alone. They had not sat too heavily on Philip Reynolds himself, and had shadowed the Vicar but little, and had shadowed the vicarage life and Lucilla not at all. He was always readier with half-crowns than with soup or jellies, and he prayed for his flock more than he fussed it.

He, not Lucilla, had been the housekeeper. He had a flair for housekeeping, and she had not. He engaged the servants, arranged the menus as a rule, paid the bills and planned hospitalities. Lucilla had had an ample allowance—Reynolds liked things well done, and he perfectly knew that that required money—but she never exceeded, rarely spent, all of it, and more often than not consulted her father about the color and material of a new frock. The result had justified her—if it had not altogether fitted her for the selection of her own wardrobe which lay before her now. It was thanks chiefly to the Reverend Philip Reynolds that the women on the big P. and O. so admired young Mrs. Crespin’s gowns. He had taken far more interest in Lucilla’s trousseau than she had—and it had cost him a great deal of money. Little as she knew of money, the bills for that trousseau would have appalled Lucilla, if she ever had seen them; but they had warmed the Vicar’s heart like good wine, and he wrote the checks with a glowing face, and with a complacent flourish at the end of his scholarly signature. There would not be a great deal to leave his girl at his death, but he had no wish that they should have a very great deal; and Antony had enough. And Helen’s modest inheritance was secure for Lucilla.

All this had kept Lucilla Reynolds very young. She had had few tasks, and no burdens. She never had gone to school. She had had expensive and highly efficient governesses—the best that large salaries, great care, and the Vicar’s good sense and fine taste could procure: estimable women who also were charming. But none of them had lived at the vicarage. Lured from London and Paris, one of the conditions of their engagement always had been that they should find for themselves or allow Mr. Reynolds to find for them apartments at a reasonable distance from the vicarage, but by no means close to its gates. Their holidays had been long, and their teaching hours rather short. They had had no sinecure—the Vicar knew the value of money, and always insisted upon getting the value of his—but none of Lucilla Reynolds’ governesses had been overworked. And none of them had been encouraged to “mother” the girl, and certainly none of them had had any reason to regard as the most remote possibility a translation from governess to step-mother. They had been handsomely paid to teach, and so wisely had they been chosen that they had done it handsomely. They had loved the girl too; and she had liked them all, but she had loved none of them. Lucilla Crespin had felt love but twice: love for her father, and love for the soldier who was taking her with him to India now. And she scarcely had had a girl friend. If this last had narrowed her, it too had preserved her. It had made her a poor hand at some sorts of “small talk,” but it had kept her mind fresh and undiscolored.

Philip Reynolds had “formed” his girl himself, he and the books he had shared with her and the environment he had given her. And her actual “education” he had officered even more than any of her paid teachers had. Had their wills ever clashed or their tastes jarred, such constant companionship might have rasped the girl. But their wills had been one, and their tastes had too. Best of all, for her welfare, she never had been able to feel for her father less than absolute respect. And she had always had to be proud of him. She had never found her home life dull, for the father had been a perfect playmate. It was small wonder that she, whose girlhood had been so guarded, but never stagnant, and had been so companioned—so rarely companioned—was younger than her years—and seemed even younger than she was. It was no wonder at all that she missed her father. She missed him terribly.

There were a number of men and several women on board whom Captain Crespin had known in India, had met in the hills, at Calcutta and in leaves in Kashmir; but none of his regiment, or of his own station in the Punjab. But at Malta two brother officers, returning from a shorter leave than his, joined the ship. As a matter of course they “chummed up” with the Crespins and Crespin with them.

They had heard of his marriage, and were not a little anxious to know just what manner of girl was coming “on to their strength.” There were only four women in the regiment—that is, actually in the station—just now, and in the small station there was no other regiment, and no social life whatever beyond what the regiment made for itself. Where the women were so few it was distinctly important what manner of women they were: how much to be liked, how far congenial and helpful. Two of the ladies already with the regimental colors were dearly loved by every man in it; two were not. The new Mrs. Crespin would make the preponderance for social comfort or discomfort. Which? Bruce and Crossland wondered. They didn’t say so to each other, of course. India’s a gossipy place—Anglo-India—and in the Punjabi dearth even the soldier-men “talk” over their tobacco. But only the “bounders” ever discuss the women folk of brother officers, and there are very few bounders commissioned into the British army, and the few that are are rather apt to drift out: they are apt to find that there is not comfortable room for them in their regiment.

Crossland and Bruce had never so much as hinted to each other their hope and their fear as to how far Crespin’s wife might sweeten or bitter their next few years. But both knew that (and what) both were hoping and fearing somewhat acutely.

The sun was setting over Valetta as the great P. and O. swung and throbbed back to her course. Malta lay rose and gold in the sunset, the Church of St John looked gold inlaid with pink and amber, the old auberges where the Knights once kept their palaced state sparkled red and gold in the heat of the sun’s dying radiance, and the exquisite high-walled little gardens looked chips of garnet, emerald and topaz, and even the carob-trees and prickly pears in the sparcer bare and rocky valleys were jeweled and gay in the waning splendor. Back of and over the city of Valetta, with its queer, steep, twisted streets and its picturesque and magnificent buildings—more flowers, more great and varied architecture, and more human beings and homes are packed into Malta’s teeming ninety-five square miles than are in the same space anywhere else—hung the sunset’s gorgeous curtain of ever-changing amethyst and gold, crimson and rose and apple-green and fire-shot lemon, and here in front of the island at her feet the great blue ocean rippled and spread like a tremulous carpet woven of blue and green gems.

And this was the background against which, when they came on to the deck, after hastily changing for dinner, Bruce and Crossland first saw their regiment’s latest recruit—Captain Crespin’s girl-wife.

The Crespins too already were dressed to dine, and she, in her soft frock of delicate blue, with touches here and there of vivid green velvet, which the Vicar had proudly pronounced “most happy,” an inch of silvery gray fur at its fluted hem, a great bunch of saffron and lemon roses, that Crespin had bought her in Valetta’s fragrant flower market, in her hands, and a rose—one of the deep ones—at her breast, and loosely over her hair the shawl of black Maltese lace that Antony too had bought as they wandered about the old, once Phœnician town of the Hospitalers, looked for all her palpably English tea-rose face not unlike some exquisite Maltese.

They were standing by the rail, watching the sunset city—the Crespins—but Antony was more particularly watching her, his face turned a little towards the deck, and he saw his brother officers, and hailed them.

When he introduced them to “my wife,” Bruce, forgetting it was for her to grant it, if she chose, not for him to ask it, impulsively held out his hand—after all she was one of them now—and Lucilla instantly and cordially gave him hers; and when he let it go, not too quickly, she held it out with a pretty friendly gesture, half girlish, half matronly to Dr. Crossland, and said to them both, “How jolly! I thought I should have to wait until we got to Sumnee before I knew any of you. This is ever so much nicer.” And her big blue eyes, deep and clear as sapphires, but softer under their curled fringe of long dark lashes, said shyly, “Please like me.”

“By Jove, Mrs. Crespin”—she was not very used yet to being called so, and she flushed deliciously, and a dimple trembled at one corner of her bow-shaped red mouth—“By Jove, it is ripping of you to say so,” Bruce stammered delightedly. And Crossland looked what Bruce had said.

They saw without looking the relief in each other’s faces.

Crespin saw it too, and laughed aloud.

“What is it?” Lucilla demanded.

“Ask them,” Antony chuckled, and sauntered off, leaving the three alone.

“What was Tony laughing at?” the girl persisted.

Dr. Crossland smiled sagely, but shook his head decidedly.

“I’ll tell you some day, if I dare, Mrs. Crespin,” Bruce promised her. “Wouldn’t dare tell you now, don’t you know. My hat, I’m glad we’ve hopped on to your boat—no end a tamasha we’ll have getting out to our 306-in-the-shade paradise. I say, don’t you let Crespin give us the slip in Calcutta, will you?”

“Why did he laugh? What was funny? Do tell me.”

But neither man would do that.

But they each fell very industriously to making particularly good friends with Antony Crespin’s wife.

And that night in the stateroom they shared each made a cryptic remark, one to his hair-brush, one to the shoe he kicked off.

“Thank the Lord!” Tom Bruce told his shoe audibly.

George Crossland, under his breath said to his brush, frowning at it, “Poor girl!”

CHAPTER IV

“Shall I like India, Captain Bruce?”

“Sure to—all women do. But you’ll jolly well hate Sumnee. It’s the jumping-off place.”

“Shall I?” Mrs. Crespin repeated, turning a little to Crossland.

“Like India, Mrs. Crespin? Most women do, more than like it. Bruce is right there. But I’m not sure about you.”

“Why?”

“You are different,” he said simply.

“Why shall I dislike Sumnee?” she asked them both.

“Good Lord!” Bruce answered.

“My hat!” Crossland said.

“As bad as all that?” Lucilla said gayly.

“Worse,” they both answered her instantly.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Tony?” Mrs. Crespin asked severely.

“You mightn’t have come,” her husband told her, “and I rather wanted you to.”

Lucilla blushed.

“Don’t mind us,” Bruce said encouragingly.

Dr. Crossland looked out over the water.

But it was to him that she said, “Please tell me about Sumnee.”

“Well,” he began, “it’s hot.”

“Of course,” Lucilla interrupted him scornfully, “it’s India. Even I know that. Even in Surrey we have heard that it is warm in the Punjab.”

“You have heard no lie,” Bruce said stoutly. “Surrey! Good Lord—to be in Surrey when the marrow’s in bloom and the cabbage in fruit, and the starch stands to its collar! Hot! Hot isn’t the word.”

“It is not,” Crespin agreed.

“Is Sumnee so very hot, Dr. Crossland?”

“Scorching!”

“Go on,” she prompted.

“Well—there’s nothing to tell—really there isn’t. There’s nothing to describe, because there’s nothing there. There’s scarcely a tree.”

“I shall make a garden at once, if we haven’t one.”

“You will not,” Bruce murmured.

“Go on, Dr. Crossland. There must be something to tell me.”

“And there isn’t a decent house.”

“But there must be. We don’t live in tents, do we?”

“We live in mud huts,” Bruce said softly, “and live on goat.”

“But roast kid is perfect. Daddy and I particularly like it.”

“In Sumnee it is—imperfect,” Bruce remarked grimly.

But though they railed, Lucilla Crespin caught a warm undercurrent of affection, of pleasant memories and zesty anticipations in the raillery. Every woman owns to liking India greatly; most men pose as disliking it—while they are there; but ask the Anglo-Indian “home now for good,” when you run across him in the Strand, just there at Charing Cross where we all meet each other sooner or later—and he’ll tell you, if he’s English-honest, that he is homesick for India, rains, droughts, natives and all; and watch the face of the long-service Anglo-Indian going home for the last time, going home to inheritance, increased fortune and ease perhaps—watch his face and his eyes as the P. and O. or troop-ship pulls off from Bombay or Madras or down the Hugli, and he takes his long last look at the sweltering East! You will not need to ask him.

They were having afternoon tea on deck, Malta two days behind them—the sun-awnings were up now, and ices were served at eleven and three—and Crespin said as he held his cup up for her to fill it again, “Never mind, Lu, you shall have a garden of sorts, and these blighters shall dig it, while you and I sit under the veranda punkah and eat mango-ices and stone-cold pumelos. You shall have all the comfy home things, every one of them. And perhaps you won’t quite hate poor old rotten Sumnee. I shall like Sumnee now.”

“You, you lucky beggar—of course you will. Who wouldn’t, in your shoes?” Bruce grumbled. “But perhaps we’ll like it better too—now—” he added more cheerfully. “And we’ll teach you how to play parlor polo, and how to make toothsome chupatties out of mud and cocoanut fat, and how to eat mangoes without a bib on, and, if you’ll let us, come to tea every day, and tiffin on Sundays, and dinner quite often, we’ll give you curly daggers and beetle-work lace curtains and bunches of cactus dahlias and crushed torquoise things from the Vale of Kashmir, Lucknow enamels—fish-pattern ones, Bokhara cloths, Poona trays, Benares brass-work, Deccan snakes (tin, not live ones) and peacock-feather fans, thousands and thousands of peacock feathers, painted leather Bikanir vases and glass bangles, and tin toe-rings to make your drawing-room beautiful.”

“But, you mustn’t,” Lucilla Crespin told him firmly. “I intend our home to be absolutely English. There shall not be even one thing in it that isn’t quite English, not one that hasn’t come from home.”

“Right-o!” Bruce consented. “We’ll forgive you, so long as you ask us to tea every day and tiffin on Sundays, and dinner very often. And you and I will sit on the veranda under the punkah, and eat mango-ices and chilled pumelos, while Crespin and Crossland dig your garden and swear at each other.”

“I shall not have a punkah,” Mrs. Crespin said severely. “I shall have nothing, I tell you, that we do not have at home. Our home is going to be an English home.”

“You’ll have a punkah, dear,” said Crespin softly. “You’ll have several.”

“My hat, you will!” Bruce exclaimed. “And you’ll have a few other things that are not strictly English—what. White ants in the sugar, silver-fish and lizards—single spies and whole battalions of them—on your walls and out for a ride on the train of your dinner-gown, and centipedes, and cheetahs grinning in at the windows, jackals serenading you every night, and goat to eat, I repeat, which will not taste like infant Southdown, and native servants. You may like the native servants, and you may not. It’s a matter of taste.”

But Lucilla only laughed. “I’m not afraid, Captain Bruce,” she said. “You can’t frighten me.”

Crossland said nothing, but he studied the waves gravely as they foamed and beat at each other in ocean play, and his eyes were cloudy. So another English woman was coming to India to live in it apart from its peoples and beauties and wisdoms—to hold her skirts aside from India. He thought it a pity. He’d seen it so often—and he believed it the most dangerous of the several rocks upon which the ship of Empire might some day split and go down.

CHAPTER V

Lucilla Crespin did not like Sumnee. She liked her life there fairly well. She loved her home there. She loved Antony. She liked some of his friends. She loved her happiness, and nourished and cherished it. She liked the English Club measurably; she liked the tennis court palely—it was better than none, but it was a poor imitation of tennis courts in Surrey. She did make a garden, verbenas in flower-pots mostly, and she tried to like it; and when they came she worshiped her babies. But she did not like Sumnee. She did not even like India.

But she was happy in Sumnee. Not every one can be happy in a place they dislike; but there are some so equipped for happiness that they can find, or, not finding, make it, almost anywhere, and it requires far less personal balance and natural joyousness than Lucilla had, to be happy in London (or even in Berlin) when one would far rather live in New York, if one is young, radiantly well, comfortably pursed (one can buy a deal of happiness) and loves and is loved. Mrs. Crespin was happy in Sumnee—at first. And the years passed. But her years taught her much that “her days never knew”—for a while.

It is said that all English women like India, and very much like living there. Most of them do—but there are exceptions.

Two classes of European women like and enjoy India very much: the first and greatly preponderant class are the have-a-good-time ones, by no means bad sorts, as a rule, but brave, gay things who like to wear frilly white gowns, and give much time and care to dressing their hair, tree their boots and slippers and shoes, read “The Queen” and “La Monde” (if they can, and if they can’t, study its plates), and are particularly proud of their afternoon tea-table pretties of silver and lace. They like the punkahs, the abundance of servants—servants who rarely “give notice,” and never sulk—mango-ices and picnics by moonlight. They even enjoy making both ends meet—no one too much minds being poor in the East; at least, if one has some sort of entrée to Government House, and one’s man’s in the Army. Viceroys are not poor, as a rule—they would find it inconvenient, for big as their “screw” is, it isn’t enough; but Commanders-in-Chief have been poor enough before now, and, if one has to skimp, one has the satisfaction of doing it in the best of company, and in the best good-fellowship in the world. But there are women—the have-a-good-time-and-take-care-of-your-man ones—who like India but never know or sense it. Young Mrs. Crespin was not one of these, but she had several of their insular traits, and lived no little of their life. The other class (it is very small) are caught by the lure of the real India. Its story appeals to them, its peoples and its myriad wonders and beauties. They feel her marvel. And they catch the throb of her heart beneath the impenetrable mask, and respond and are grateful. Mrs. Crespin was not one of these.

There is a third class—a very powerful and beautiful class, which includes some of the other two: women who follow the drum, sometimes to Simla and other pleasant, cool hill places, sometimes to desolate, sun-baked spots where the ice often gives out, and nothing ever happens, and who take it all, and the make-shifts of outlandish frontier stations with quiet good humor; women whose courage and unselfishness are very fine, and very womanly. They are a great racial asset, the strength and the solace of their men folk; and, if they spared of the devotion they lavish on those same British soldier-men one tithe to the brown human peoples that live about them, and minister to them so loyally, they would be a greater asset of permanent and successful Empire than any in Whitehall.

One of these Lucilla might have been—she shaped towards it at first—but circumstances (fate, if you like) balked it.

India, great gold and rose India, marbled, carved, mosaicked, caravaned, with its bazaars and temples and its lonely peasant huts, its seas of quivering bamboo and its music of glass and silver bangles and anklets, its beautiful naked, plump butchas, its sacred purdahs, its mingled perfumes of lotus and wild yellow hyacinths, of pink jasmine and red, red roses, its dark-eyed, wrinkled, patient cattle with ropes of marigold slung between their snow-white and cream-colored humps, its storied rivers—and the Himalayas, might have appealed to her as the Vicar had thought it would, could she have seen it with him, or in other guidance as cordial and fit. But she saw it through the dry choking dust of a hot, arid, flat Punjabi station, sensed it through the chatter of an English Club—and, so, neither saw nor sensed it at all. She never touched its people. Her syce was merely a servant, so impersonal that she never knew or asked his name, her house servants were nothing to her but “boys,” and even the ayah who tended upon her deftly and faithfully, and saved her baby’s life when croup and convulsions nearly killed it, was only an ayah. Mrs. Crespin, as sweet at heart as the roses in the Surrey vicarage garden, never knew her ayah’s name, never thought of her as having one, never knew where she lived, what she ate, or thought, or believed; never wondered what were her joys and sorrows, never wondered if she ever had ache or pain; never knew, or cared to know, whether the native woman was married or not, or widowed, or whether she had a child of her own.

But she was happy at Sumnee—at first. She had Antony, and Antony was enough.

Her homesickness never quite ceased to ache, and she missed riding and games. She had both at Sumnee, but both were poor substitutes for those she had at “home.” Always athletic, she was not fully satisfied at playing at sports, and gymkanas bored her almost as much as church bazaars had, and the Vicar of Oxlea always had rather discouraged church bazaars. Womanly, yet she was not a woman’s woman—and life in an out-of-the-way one-regiment station in the plains is apt to be hard on a woman who does not greatly care for feminine society, but has no coquetry in her. But she had Antony, and she was happy, and when the promise of motherhood pulsed she was more than happy. And, if many of her hours were alone ones, she had many books, and she read hour after hour almost every day.

Twice the Yule-log burned on her bungalow hearth—great chunks of fragrant deodar that Lucilla garlanded with ribbons; the heat they made in December in the plains was appalling, but Lucilla Crespin would not keep Christmas without them. And they ate their plum-pudding hot and flaming; and there’s no dearth of holly in India, if you know where to send for it. Twice her Yule-log burned on her bungalow hearth. And then the crash came.

CHAPTER VI

Armistice Day and its solemn celebrations had passed—but not its deep thanksgiving—when the regiment was ordered to Dehra Dun, a more interesting, less narrowed station in itself and less service-bound. There was civilian life in Dehra Dun, and Mrs. Crespin was not sorry to know a few civilians again. She made several interesting such acquaintances there, and the most interesting of them all turned out to be an old schoolmate of Major Crespin’s.

The Great War had irked Crespin—because in it he had been debarred from the active service he craved to be sent on in Europe, or even in Egypt or Mesopotamia, and had been kept relentlessly in India—and hurt him as only a soldierly soldier can be hurt, and by that one thing: having to “stand-by” and do the “damned cushy” jobs, when other chaps—“lucky devils”—were losing legs and eyes and lives in Flanders and Gallipoli—but also it incidentally made him a Major, and a really fine wireless expert.

He did his “bit,” of course, and he did it well. But who did not do their bit from the August of 1914 till Armistice Day, and a little longer! He did his bit, but he chafed and swore, and came near breaking his heart.

Basil Traherne—the celebrated Dr. Traherne now—and Antony Crespin had been at Harrow together, fag and fag-master. But they had not met since, and Crespin seemed less glad to reencounter his onetime fag than might have been natural; for Traherne had been a good and a devoted fag, and the boys had been really good friends.

But—there—that was over twenty years ago—Crespin was thirty-eight now, and Traherne was thirty-three—and a good deal changes in most of us, as well as around us, in twenty years. And friendships that never are fed by so much as a letter must be the exceptional friendships of very exceptional people, if they lose nothing in twenty years. How many ever have?

Mrs. Crespin liked Traherne immediately, and he returned her liking cordially—and was grateful for it. And Major Crespin was more glad to have the physician “amuse the wife” than he was to see much of him himself, or with anything of an old intimacy that time had shrunk and withered.

Traherne interested Lucilla Crespin at once—they seemed to like and to dislike (a surer test of sympathy) the same people, things and books. And when she heard that he not only was the perhaps greatest living authority on malaria, and certainly the coming doctor-man as far as Oriental disease was concerned, but also was “mad on flying,” was no mean pilot, and had a “bus” of his own, she actually clapped her hands, and said, “Oh, Dr. Traherne—I never have been—will you take me up?”

And several men, Colonel Agnew among them, who saw and heard, who always had known that she was decidedly good-looking, discovered for the first time that she was positively lovely. And the Colonel was vastly pleased that “Crespin’s wife had found something to wake her up again, something to interest her, don’t you know, and make a fad of. Every woman needs a fad—such a safety-valve and pick-me-up to ’em, God bless ’em, as polo, or whist or the Times is to us, by Jove.”

Colonel Agnew—Crespin’s C. O.—had a cold blue eye, a terrible temper, as curry-hot as any in Anglo-India (you can’t say more than that), and a heart of soft warm gold. He admired Mrs. Crespin more than any woman he knew, and loved her almost as much as he did Kathleen, his own motherless girl. He wouldn’t have liked her so well if his wife, who had not died until two years after Lucilla joined the regiment, had not liked her very much indeed, and approved her warmly, and if Kathleen did not—and he was no worse a man and no worse a soldier for that. But he was not cut very strictly to pattern in it, or in several other respects. He held Mrs. Crespin very high. And he was fatherly-fond of her. And he was grateful to her. At first he had warmed to her because he felt that she, and her good-looks and poise, did the regiment credit. Then he had liked her for her more intimate self, and because Mary and Kathleen did. To do the regiment the smallest good-turn, to enhance it in any way directly or indirectly, was for Colonel Agnew instantly to write himself down very much in your debt: if you were a small drummer boy who drummed well and loyally, a matranee who swept the sergeant’s mess out as a sergeant’s mess should be swept, or a visiting general who gave the men and officers their due. Too, Agnew was grateful to Mrs. Crespin for a service not exactly regimental; for it was she who under God had coaxed Kathleen back into her senses when that blithering young ass Bob Grant had made such a silly goat of himself—before Colonel Agnew had contrived a way to get the fool transferred. The old soldier felt that he owed Mrs. Crespin more than he could hope ever to pay. And he had been sore at heart over her this many a day now. And when he saw her eyes sparkle, and her old rose color come at Traherne’s “flying” talk, he vowed hotly then and there (but not aloud) that she should “go up,” if she liked, and as often as she liked, and he was damned if Crespin should prevent it.

But Major Crespin had no wish to do that. He was only too glad to have any pleasure fall to his wife. And so Mrs. Crespin went up with Traherne, and very much more than once. Crespin went with them once or twice, but he did not care for it greatly, and he didn’t mind saying so. Usually Traherne and Mrs. Crespin flew alone—with or without a mechanic. They did not fly very far, and they did not fly over-often, and Traherne took no risks when his friend’s wife was with him. But Lucilla Crespin liked it keenly; she talked about it, and thought about it a great deal, far less silent now than she had been since before the war, and a happier light crept into her eyes, and a soft glow on her face. And Crespin was as gratified as the Colonel himself was. Antony Crespin was as glad to have Lucilla go as she was to go, and as Dr. Traherne was to take her.

Once or twice Captain Bruce went up with them, and they made several attempts to take the Colonel.

But the Colonel swore at the very suggestion. He had the V. C. and he had earned it. He was cheerfully (and profanely) ready to shoot promptly any one who called him a coward, but there was just one thing he wouldn’t do either for King or Country—he wouldn’t go monkeying about in the air like a loon; and Kathleen shouldn’t do it either.

There are no tête-à-têtes in the air—none at least in which the pilot shares. But they shared an exhilaration, a splendid new experience, and a pastime that they almost equally liked. And they mutually knew that they liked to share it all, and enjoyed and treasured it more because they shared it. And the very silences it enforced fed the intimacy that grew between them.

When they came back, and landed, it was natural that more often than not Dr. Traherne took Mrs. Crespin to her bungalow, and that when they had reached it he followed her in for tiffin or tea. They found a great deal to say to each other, about books and people and things in England. He knew he was welcome; she knew that he liked to be there. And Traherne’s visits at the Crespins’ bungalow gradually grew more frequent and longer. And Major Crespin stayed at home more and more, strolled off to mess or club less and less when Traherne was in the drawing-room or on the veranda. And something of the old, cordial relation between them at Harrow came back to the two men at Dehra Dun. Lucilla and Traherne did the most of the talking when they three were together. And often Antony Crespin scarcely knew what they were talking about; but he liked to listen—and sometimes to guy as he lounged near and played with Iris and Ronald—and they liked to have him there with them, listening and guying.

Traherne played with the youngsters often too. They were attractive children—not ayah-spoiled yet, and the bachelor physician was very fond of children. And little Iris and Ronald Crespin soon came to claim him as very much a possession of their own.

If his regiment was at once Colonel Agnew’s weakness and strength, equally her babies were Lucilla Crespin’s—her weakness and her strength. Iris was four now, Ronald was two. And Antony Crespin loved them both almost as much as he loved his wife.

All the regiment knew, and as good as all of the station, that there was an ugly, desperate rift in the Crespins’ lute.

Major Crespin drank.

And he had not been faithful.

Every one blamed him fiercely. And no one in the least blamed Mrs. Crespin for anything that had come or might come—no one but Basil Traherne.

He blamed them both, and pitied them both. He believed that Mrs. Crespin could have handled the tragedy more wisely and more usefully than she did. He believed that she, unconsciously, withheld help and rescue which she, but no one else, might have given, and Antony seized. No one else saw or thought anything of the sort—Lucilla Crespin least of all. But it’s a habit and gift able physicians have: to see into things. Each finger a scalpel, each pore a magnifying glass; exquisite manhood, a vigilant brain, a great sympathetic heart, an absolute balance and sense of justice, and an intelligence that cannot be tricked—and that is what good doctors are made of! Basil Traherne was a very great physician.

He saw the rift as clearly as any—deplored it more than most, and knew, what no one else but Antony himself did, that because of it and of what had made it, Major Crespin suffered and regretted even more intensely than the woman did.

Dr. Traherne believed that some, not much, but some, of the fault was Lucilla Crespin’s. And that he did, proves him as fine in manhood as he was in physicianship; for, before he had known her a month Traherne knew that he loved Antony Crespin’s wife. He had never loved a woman before—or even thought that he had. He believed he never could care for another. And Dr. Traherne was thirty-six.

CHAPTER VII

Colonel Agnew was furious, splutteringly, dementedly furious, and at the same time coldly, and determinedly furious. No one ever had seen him so angry before. Kathleen, who ruled and teased and mocked him openly, poured out his coffee, and passed him the ginger-jam silently and abjectly. And a few moments after breakfast she fled from his presence—her own Daddy darling’s—determined to avoid it for the rest of that day.

When Satan, his four-footed pal, sat up and begged for his after-breakfast lump the master had refused it, and thundered, “Go to hell!” No one ever had known Agnew to lose his temper with Satan, and the terrier flounced down on all paws, and slunk sugarless out of the room.

“Prayers, Daddy?” Kathleen said, as naturally as she could, when they’d pushed back their chairs. The Colonel was a staunch churchman, but no cut-and-dried one; usually he read a chapter to his girl after breakfast, and they said “Our Father” together, and then, if it wasn’t too late, he’d bid her sing some hymn her mother had loved and sung—usually, but not always, and it was Kathleen Agnew’s daily duty—almost her only enforced one—to ask if it was a “prayers” day, and to follow him into his den, and find the place in the Bible, if it was.

“Prayers, Daddy?” she asked gently.

“Prayers be damned!” was the terrible reply she got, and all she got—not even a glance—as the Colonel stalked prayerless out of the room.

It was then she’d beaten her retreat “Poor Daddy!” she thought. “How terribly he’s feeling it!” She shook her pretty, yellow head sadly after his grim, gaunt gray one, and then smiled rather brokenly. For she thought there had been a lump in his throat—of course Daddy couldn’t read prayers with a lump in his throat, poor dear. And Kathleen knew what it all was about. It was early morning yet, but all the regiment knew, and by tiffin all the station would know. And Whitehall would know by the very next mail home.

It was all up with Major Crespin now. He’d have to send in his papers this time. Every man in the regiment knew it, every native regimental servant. Every servant in the Colonel-sahib’s bungalow knew it. Native women filling their jars at the wells were talking it over. Iris and Ronald’s ayah and bearer had known it hours ago. The Parsi money changer who lived near the native bazaar, in the old house off of whose thick walls most of the magenta paint had cracked and gone, and Ali Lal, the melon-seller who drove his best trade in the despised Eurasian quarter, knew it too. Such news is no laggard in India; it flies faster than kites.

It was this:

At mess the night before Major Crespin had befouled and disgraced the regiment. And it had been guest night. A bishop from Bangalore, a general (almost a commander-in-chief) from the Madras Presidency, and—a thousand times worse, more bitter—an American officer of high rank, and Dr. Traherne had been the guests.

Crespin had had a fagging day, the Adjutant had looked at him suspiciously once or twice, and when the dinner hour came Major Crespin had had almost enough. When sweetbreads followed the fish he had had enough. And he grew offensive before the game. He came dangerously near contradicting the General twice. He mentioned a woman’s name—one of the regimental ladies—and, in what he said, quite unobjectionably, but a woman’s name is not mentioned in the officers’ mess. You may think of her there—subalterns have owned to having done it—but you may not voice her name. It isn’t done. He had spilled claret, and he had offered the Bishop a warm letter of personal introduction to the première danseuse of a French Company crowding a Calcutta theater just then—an artiste notoriously as frail of virtue as she was shameless in posture and skilful of feet. He had made—to the American—an unpardonable remark about Lee and Grant. It was all covered up, or attempted to be. The affronted guests all were not only gentlemen but jolly good fellows, and two of them had met Mrs. Crespin. It was smothered, talked under and shunted; and Traherne, the American officer, and the Bishop more than half hoped that Agnew, at the other end of the table from Crespin, had not noticed or realized. He had given no sign, and Crespin had purred his impertinences a little thickly, not shouted them, or pronounced them too clearly.

But at “Gentlemen, the King,” as Agnew lifted his glass, Major Crespin, swaying a little on his feet, clutched at the back of the chair, hiccuped painfully, looked about him with a bleary smile, and collapsed half onto his chair, half onto the table.

There was nothing to be hoped then. There was nothing that could be done.

No more need be said.

It was final.

And now it was the next morning, that terrible, pitiless next morning that always comes, and always must, unless God grants the mercy of Death before the dawn.

It was the next morning and Antony Crespin, twitching and sick, lay wide awake on Traherne’s bed.

He was suffering exquisite bodily torture. Traherne had done what he could. But that debt has to be paid. And it’s an I.O.U. that no friend’s purse can take up. The debtor himself has to pay.

But his mental torment was more than his quivering of fevered flesh and frightened trembling of sick, circling stomach. And his sorrow and shame of spirit were more than his wife’s were, lying tearless, face down on her own bed. And Doctor Traherne—glass in hand—sensed that it was so, and pitied Crespin even more than he pitied Lucilla, even more than he pitied unconscious, happy Iris and Ronald.

But an ounce of help is worth more than a pound of pity any day—and most especially is this true “the next morning.” Traherne slid his strong arm carefully under Crespin’s head, and held the glass deftly to his mouth. The champagne was vintage and extra sec.

In spite of himself, in spite of his despair—it was almost absolute despair this time—the wine tasted good. Champagne usually does taste good to those who relish it. Perhaps it stands as firmest friend and kindest nurse to the very desperately seasick, but its second-best play of its magic trick probably is made “the next morning.”

Crespin drained the glass, and even put up a trembling hand to tilt it farther and longer that he should miss no last drop. And he looked around to see where the bottle was.

There was no bottle in sight.

“You’ve had it all, old chap,” Traherne told him, “a pint of it. Now try to rest a bit.”

“Rest!” Crespin moaned.

“Lie perfectly still. That will help. I won’t be long.”

“You’re not going to leave me!”

“Must,” Traherne told him, pulling the chick a little closer. “Sorry, but must. I’ve something to see to that won’t keep. I’ll be back as soon as I can. And I’ll tell Abdul what to do for you, and to see that you’re not disturbed.”

“Traherne, you must not leave me.” There’s never a time so miserable that the sound and sight of a friend—the right friend—cannot ease it.

“Look here,” Traherne said with his hand on the other’s arm, “I must. I wouldn’t, if any one else could do what I’ve got to, but no one can. I must attend to it myself, and I must attend to it now. Keep quiet—that will help you most. And I’ll get back as soon as I can.”

Crespin called weakly after him as he was leaving the room.

“I suppose—my wife—knows.”

Traherne evaded, as doctors sometimes must.

“She knows you slept here last night. I sent her a chit when we came in.”

“Came in, I supporting your staggering steps, I suppose,” Crespin said, with the sick attempt at humor that often comes with the stale after-fumes.

“We came in together,” Traherne said affectionately.

“O Lord,” Crespin told him, “you’re the real stuff, Traherne!”

“Of course I am—to you. Now I am off. So long!”

But he was not off just yet.

“I say,” Crespin pleaded anxiously, “can I have another drink?”

“Not yet,” Traherne told him. “You shall, when I get back, with something to eat——”

“Don’t!” the sick man groaned. “Give me a smoke then, before you go, and for God’s sake don’t be long.”

Traherne found him the cigarettes, and took him the matches.

“Smoke if you like,” he said, “but I wouldn’t smoke yet, if I were you.”

Crespin put his hand out for a cigarette, but even his hand was sick, and fell back from the effort.

Doctor Traherne put a cigarette in his hand, and struck a match and held it. But Major Crespin couldn’t smoke.

Traherne left him then, closing the door of the darkened room with careful quiet.

And Antony Crespin was alone with his creditor.

CHAPTER VIII

Doctor Traherne was persona grata at Colonel Agnew’s bungalow, if any one was; and several were. Their people at home in England were neighbors and friends, and for that Agnew would have welcomed him, if there had been nothing else. But there was a great deal else. It was not often that Agnew liked a civilian, or saw anything in one to like. He didn’t see what use they were anyway. The world was made for warfare, scientific, deliberated warfare, he had no doubt whatever of that. Most especially was it made for the British Army, and above all for his regiment. He was a staunch old Tory, of course—there are some still, and more than a few of them are in India—but he never troubled to read the speeches in the House, not even those of the Lords, unless they directly bore on His Majesty’s Forces. He had no respect for any calling but his own—and almost as little intelligent knowledge as respect. He had gone in for fisticuffs in his cradle, and though his schoolmasters had not, among themselves, pronounced him startlingly brainy, none of them denied him considerable place as a tactician. He was an emphatic churchman—far more emphatic than devout—but he respected the church rather than its officers: he had no respect for any profession but his own. And this fact he rarely concealed. He reverenced his King—but most, it may be suspected, because His Majesty was the Head of the Army. Even the somewhat civilian adjuncts of the Service, doctors and padres and such, he held rather coldly. He liked most women, and reverenced them all. But he had no doubt that God had made them to bear soldiers, and to be loved by the soldier-fathers of soldiers, and he pitied acutely any woman who had to make do with the caresses of less than a soldier-man or who brought forth any men children who failed to crawl through Sandhurst or Woolwich exams, and bolt enthusiastically into the fighting forces. He thought more of a private than he did of a Viceroy—and said so. And he’d gladly have given Kathleen to that blithering young jackass Bob Grant rather than to the Archbishop of Canterbury, or to a royal bridegroom who was not in the Service. No German warlord ever thought more of himself than Colonel Agnew thought of the British Army.

But there were soldierly qualities of mind and person in Basil Traherne to which the fine old specialist had had to respond. And if Doctor Traherne had not served with the Colors (Agnew simply refused to consider Volunteers) he had served the regiment well. He had disinfected and healed a diseased drain under the floor of the canteen when Crossland hadn’t even suspected it, he had fought enteric through more than one epidemic, and had turned a cholera camp into a refreshed place of rest and frolic as innocuous as a kindergarten suffering placidly a slight visitation of mild German measles. And now Doctor Traherne had declared war upon malaria, and it looked as if that enemy of the British Army in the East was going to be defeated at last—defeated by the batteries of the English doctor’s knowledge, patience and skill. It wasn’t in Agnew to steel his heart or shut his respect and camaraderie against the man who was doing that, even if he didn’t wear the uniform.

And at the Colonel’s bungalow Doctor Traherne came and went as he would; always welcomed, always regretfully sped. But that bungalow door was practically shut in his face this morning.

The Colonel Commander Sahib was writing his English chits; no one could see him. And when the khansamah had said it he deliberately, though obsequiously, barred the way. Traherne could not get past Ali Halim without knocking him down, that was clear, and Traherne would not do that except in the last resort, for Halim was old, and they were most excellent friends. And at the far end of the hall—unlike most of its ilk, the Colonel’s bungalow had a hall—the physician saw an orderly waiting outside Agnew’s den. No doubt the orderly was armed; and Traherne was not.

But he was going to see the Colonel, and have considerable speech of him too, before the English mail went.

How?

He looked about him and thought: not a bad brace of trumps to play when in such doubt of means as his.

“Right-o, then,” he said cheerfully, “but I’ll wait here a bit, and cool, before I go. I’ve been walking fast”—which was true—“and I’m confoundedly hot and tired”—which was not true.

Ali Halim salaamed, and Doctor Traherne sat himself down in a very beautiful and big chair, which Kathleen Agnew had coveted and the Colonel paid for, in Lahore, standing now beside a very ugly hall table which the Colonel had admired in a catalogue, and had had sent out all the way from the Tottenham Court Road.

How?

A gong, a disk of hammered brass, slung in a frame of carved and inlaid camphor-wood, which Kathleen also had coveted somewhere and with the usual result, stood beside a bowl of magnolia buds on the Tottenham Court table. It never was used. Not even Kathleen Agnew dared use it. For the master of the bungalow detested noise, except bugle-calls, regimental bands and drill and parade orders, and the mighty music of battle, almost as much as he despised civilians. Even the clocks in his bungalow had to tick softly, and were not allowed to strike above a whisper. No bell rang for meals here, and certainly no gong was struck. “A damned impertinent way of telling a gentleman his food was ready—of course it was ready, when it was the precise moment at which it should be ready.” Meals were not even announced under Colonel Agnew’s rule. You went in to a second on time—and the meal was ready, ready then, neither before nor after. More than one English woman, visiting India, and the Agnews’ guest for a day or a meal, wondered how her host would have adjusted himself to the post-war servants of London. Kathleen could have told them that he would not have done so, but that in all human probability they would have adjusted their post-war selves to him—or, if they didn’t, he’d “cook the stuff himself.”

The gong was not for use. It stood on the table in the hall because Kathleen liked to see it there. And the Colonel and father didn’t care a brass farthing who saw it, or where they saw it, so long as no one ever hit it. And no one ever had from the day he paid for it till now.

Doctor Traherne used it now.

He picked up the mallet, and whacked that gong as if he’d suddenly gone gong-beating mad.

Ali Halim clutched at him. The khansamah almost knelt at his feet, and tears of sheer fright brimmed in the old native’s eyes. Private Grainger stood soldierly stock-still on guard, waiting outside his Colonel’s door. But the irreproachable buttons on his tunic shook, his neck rippled and turned purple with mirth. But the private did not stir. He had been told to see that no one came in to the Commandant’s room; he had not been told to do anything else, and if a Bengal Tiger and the Taj Mahal had come into the hall, and begun waltzing together, Private Grainger would not have stirred—but not a white ant could have passed by him in to the Colonel.

But the Colonel passed by him—violently.

“What the hell!” he raged as he wrenched the door open, and nearly wrenched it off.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” Traherne said nicely, laying down the mallet. “But I must see you. And Halim would neither let me go in, or tell you I was here.”

“Quite right,” was the gruff reply. “Come back to-morrow.”

“I must see you now,” Traherne insisted.

The Colonel’s neck grew as purple as the private’s.