before the lady with whom Miss
Harris was staying found it her duty to communicate to Edward Harris the
fact that dear Dora's charming friendship--she was sure it was nothing
more--with the young artist--Mrs. Poulton believed Mr. Harris would
understand who was meant--was exciting a good deal of comment in the
station, and WOULD dear Mr. Harris please write to Dora himself, as Mrs.
Poulton was beginning to feel so responsible?

I saw the letter; Harris showed it to me when he sat down to breakfast
with the long face of a man in a domestic difficulty, and we settled
together whom we should ask to put his daughter up in Calcutta. It
should be the wife of a man in his own department of course; it is to
one's Deputy Secretary that one looks for succour at times like this;
and naturally one never looks in vain. Mrs. Symons would be delighted.
I conjured up Dora's rage on receipt of the telegram. She loathed the
Symonses.

She came, but not at the jerk of a wire; she arrived a week later, with
a face of great propriety and a smile of great unconcern. Harris, having
got her effectually out of harm's way, shirked further insistence, and
I have reason to believe that Armour was never even mentioned between
them.

Dora applied herself to the gaieties of the season with the zest of
a debutante; she seemed really refreshed, revitalized. She had never
looked better, happier. I met her again for the first time at one of
the Thursday dances at Government House. In the glance she gave me I was
glad to detect no suspicion of collusion. She plainly could not dream
that Edward Harris in his nefarious exercise of parental authority had
acted upon any hint from me. It was rather sweet.

Out in the veranda, away from the blare of the Viceroy's band, she told
me very delicately and with the most charming ellipses how Armour had
been filling her life in Agra, how it had all been, for these two, a
dream and a vision. There is a place below the bridge there, where the
cattle come down from the waste pastures across the yellow sands to
drink and stand in the low water of the Jumna, to stand and switch their
tails while their herdsmen on the bank coax them back with 'Ari!' 'Ari!'
'Ari!' long and high, faint and musical; and the minarets of Akbar's
fort rise beyond against the throbbing sky and the sun fills it all.
This place I shall never see more distinctly than I saw it that night on
the veranda at Government House, Calcutta, with the convi