ttle fire of snapping deodar twigs, thought of it intently.
She remembered it all with perfect distinctness; she might have been
listening to a telephonic reproduction.

It was the almost intimate glimpse Innes had given her of himself, and
it brought her an excitement which she did not think of analyzing. She
wrung from every sentence its last possibility of unconscious meaning,
and she found when she had finished that it was eleven o'clock.

Then she went to bed, preferring not to call Brookes, with the somewhat
foolish feeling of being unable to account for her evening. Her last
reflection before she slept shaped itself in her mind in definite words.

'There are no children,' it ran, 'and her health has always been good,
he says. She must have left him after that first six months in Lucknow,
because of a natural antipathy to the country--and when she condescended
to come out again for a winter he met the different lady he thinks
about. With little hard lines around the mouth and common conventional
habits of thought, full of subservience to his official superiors, and
perfectly uninterested in him except as the source of supplies. But I
don't know why I should WANT her to be so disagreeable.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Innes, travelling at the moment with the
mails from London to Bombay, was hastening to present to Miss Anderson
features astonishingly different.

Chapter 3.III.

The lady guests at Peliti's--Mrs. Jack Owen and the rest--were giving
a tea in the hotel pavilion. They had the band, the wife of the
Commander-in-Chief, the governess from Viceregal Lodge and one
little Viceregal girl, three A.D.C.'s, one member of council, and the
Archdeacon. These were the main features, moving among a hundred or so
of people more miscellaneous, who, like the ladies at Peliti's, had come
up out of the seething Plains to the Paradise of the summer capital. The
Pavilion overhung the Mall; looking down one could see the coming
and going of leisurely Government peons in scarlet and gold, Cashmiri
vendors of great bales of embroideries and skins, big-turbaned Pahari
horse-dealers, chaffering in groups, and here and there a mounted
Secretary-sahib trotting to the Club. Beyond, the hills dipped blue
and bluer to the plains, and against them hung a single waving yellow
laburnum, a note of imagination. Madeline Anderson was looking at
it when Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge came up with an affectionate
observation upon the c