craved
overwhelmingly to take her in his arms. Had she a glimmering
idea--sitting there, so close ... so alluring...?

And suddenly, to his immense relief, she spoke.

"It was splendid. A pity it's over. That's the litany of Anglo-India.
It's over. Change the scene. Shuffle the puppets--and begin again. I've
been doing it for six years----"

"And--it doesn't pall?" His voice sounded quite natural, quite composed,
which was also a relief.

"Pall?--You try it!" For the first time he detected a faint note of
bitterness. "But still--a cotillon's a cotillon!"--She seemed to pull
herself together.--"There's an exciting element in it that keeps its
freshness. And I flatter myself we carried it through brilliantly--you
and I." The pause before the linked pronouns gave him an odd little
thrill. "But--what put you off ... at the end?"

Her amazing directness took him aback. "I--oh, well--I thought ... one
way and another, you'd been having enough of me."

"That's not true!" She glanced at him sidelong. "You were vexed because
I chose the Lister boy. And he was all over himself, poor dear! As a
matter of fact, I'd meant to have you. If you'd only looked at me ...!
But you stared fiercely the other way. However, perhaps we've been
flagrant enough for to-night----"

"Flagrant--have we?"

Daring, passionate words thronged his brain; and through his inner
turmoil, he heard her answer lightly: "Don't ask me! Ask the
Banter-Wrangle. She knows to an inch the degrees of flagrance officially
permitted to the attached and the unattached! You see, in India, we're
allowed ... a certain latitude."

"Yes--I've noticed. It's a pity...." Words simply would not come, on
this theme of all others. Was she indirectly ... telling him ...?

"And you disapprove--tooth and nail?" she queried gently. "I hoped you
were different. You don't know _how_ tired we are of eternal disapproval
from people who simply know nothing--nothing----"

"But I don't disapprove," he blurted out vehemently. "It always strikes
me as a rather middle-class, puritanical attitude. I only think--it's a
thousand pities to take the bloom off ... the big thing--the real thing,
by playing at it (you can see they do) like lawn tennis, just to pass
the time----"

"Well, Heaven knows, we've _got_ to pass the time out here--_some_how!"
she retorted, with a sudden warmth that startled him: it was so unlike
her. "All very fine for people at home to turn up superior noses at us