and learned that Number 1596
had been discharged in his coffin, she rose from the shock with the
sense of a task fully performed and a well-developed desire to see what
else there might be in the world.

She announced her intention of travelling for a year or two with a maid,
and her family expressed the usual acquiescence. It would help her, they
said, to 'shake it off'; but they said that to one another. They were
not aware--and it would have spoiled an ideal for them if they had
been--that she had shaken it off, quite completely, into Prendergast's
grave.

This was the curious reason why Miss Anderson's travels were so long
postponed.

Chapter 3.II.

It was Madeline's fancy to enjoy the contrast between West and East
in all its sharpness, so she and Brookes embarked at San Francisco for
Yokohama. Their wanderings in Japan were ideal, in spite of Brookes's
ungrateful statement that she could have done with fewer eggs and more
bacon; and Madeline prolonged the appeal of the country to her sense
of humour and fantasy, putting off her departure for India from week to
week. She went at last in March; and found herself down with fever at
Benares in the middle of one particularly hot April, two months after
the last of her fellow travellers had sailed from Bombay, haunted on her
baking pillow by pictorial views of the burning ghat and the vultures.
The station doctor, using appalling language to her punkah-coolie,
ordered her to the hills; and thus it was that she went to Simla, where
she had no intention of going, and where this story really begins.

Brookes has always declared that Providence in sending Miss Anderson to
Simla had it in mind to prevent a tragedy; but as to that there is
room for a difference of opinion: besides I can not be anticipated by
Brookes.

'It's the oddest place imaginable, and in many ways the most
delightful,' Madeline wrote to her sister Adele, 'this microcosm of
Indian official society withdrawn from all the world, and playing at
being a municipality on three Himalayan mountaintops. You can't imagine
its individuality, its airy, unsubstantial, superior poise. How can I
explain to you elderly gentlemen, whose faces express daily electric
communications with the Secretary of State, playing tennis violently
every single afternoon in striped flannels--writing letters of
admonition to the Amir all day long, and in the evening, with the
assistance of yellow wigs and make-up sticks from