rrived containing his name immediately
under that of Herr Vanrig and Mme. Dansky in the list of passengers who
had sailed per S.S. Dupleix on the fifteenth of June for Colombo. There
it was, 'I. Armour,' as significant as ever to two persons intimately
concerned with it, but no longer a wrapping of mystery, rather a
radiating centre of light. Its power of illumination was such that it
tried my eyes. I closed them to recall the outlines of the School of
Art--it had been built in a fit of economy--and the headings of the last
Director's report, which I had kindly sent after Armour to Calcutta.
Perhaps that had been the last straw.

The real meaning of the task of implanting Western ideals in the Eastern
mind rose before me when I thought of Armour's doing it--how they would
dwindle in the process, and how he must go on handling them and looking
at them withered and shrunken for twenty-odd years. I understood--there
was enough left in me to understand--Armour's terrified escape. I was
happy in the thought of him, sailing down the Bay. The possibilities
of marriage, social position, assured income, support in old age, the
strands in the bond that held him, the bond that holds us all, had been
untwisting, untwisting, from the third of June to the fifteenth. The
strand that stood for Dora doubtless was the last to break, but it did
not detract from my beatitude to know that even this consideration,
before the Dupleix and liberty, failed to hold.

I kept out of Miss Harris's way so studiously for the next week or two
that she was kind enough in the end to feel compelled to send for me. I
went with misgivings--I expected, as may be imagined, to be very deeply
distressed. She met me with a storm of gay reproaches. I had never seen
her in better health or spirits. My surprise must have been more evident
than I supposed or intended, for before I went away she told me the
whole story. By that time she had heard from Ceylon, a delicious letter
with a pen-and-ink sketch at the top. I have it still; it infallibly
brought the man back to me. But it was all over; she assured me
with shining eyes that it was. The reason of her plainly boundless
thankfulness that Armour had run away from the School of Art did not
come to the surface until I was just going. Then I gathered that if he
had taken the post she would have felt compelled, compelled by all she
had done for him, to share its honours with him; and this, ever since
at her bidding h