had no time
to think until she was on her way home along the empty road round Jakko
at eleven o'clock that night. Then it pleased her to get out of her
rickshaw and walk. There was an opulent moon, the vast hills curving
down to the plains were all grey and silvery, and the deodars overhead
fretted the road with dramatic shadows. About her hung the great
stillness in a mighty loneliness in which little Simla is set, and it
freed her from what had happened, so that she could look at it and cry
out. She actually did speak, pausing in the little pavilion on the road
where the nursemaids gather in the daytime, but very low, so that her
words fell round her even in that silence, and hardly a deodar was
aware. 'I will not go now,' she said. 'I will stay and realize that he
is another woman's husband. That should cure me if anything will--to see
him surrounded by the commonplaces of married life, that kind of married
life. I will stay till she comes and a fortnight after. Besides, I want
to see her--I want to see how far she comes short.' She was silent for
a moment, and the moonlight played upon her smile of quiet triumph.
'He cares too,' she said; 'he cares too, but he doesn't know it, and
I promise you one thing, Madeline Anderson, you won't help him to find
out. And in five weeks I will go away and leave my love where I found
it--on a mountaintop in the middle of Asia!'

Chapter 3.IV.

Madeline did her best to make certain changes delicately, imperceptibly,
so that Innes would not, above all things, be perplexed into seeking for
their reason. The walks and rides came to a vague conclusion, and Miss
Anderson no longer kept the Viceroy or anybody else waiting, while Innes
finished what he had to say to her in public, since his opportunities
for talking to her seemed to become gradually more and more like
everybody else's. So long as she had been mistress of herself she was
indifferent to the very tolerant and good-natured gossip of the hill
capital; but as soon as she found her citadel undermined, the lightest
kind of comment became a contingency unbearable. In arranging to make
it impossible, she was really over-considerate and over-careful. Her
soldier never thought of analyzing his bad luck or searching for motive
in it. To him the combinations of circumstances that seemed always to
deprive him of former pleasures were simply among the things that might
happen. Grieving, she left him under that impression for the sa