ses,' she declared; 'why shouldn't I
give tobacco to mine? Goodbye; I hope Mrs. Innes will like "Two Gables".
There are roses waiting for her in the garden, at all events.'

'Are there?' he said. 'I didn't notice. Goodbye, then.'

He went on to his office thinking of the roses, and that they were in
his garden, and that Madeline had seen them there. He thought that if
they were good roses--in fact, any kind of roses--they should be taken
care of, and he asked a Deputy Assistant Inspector-General of Ordnance
whether he knew of a gardener that was worth anything.

'Most of them are mere coolies,' said Colonel Innes, 'and I've got some
roses in this little place I've taken that I want to look after.'

Next day Madeline took Brookes, and 'The Amazing Marriage', and a
lunch-basket, and went out to Mashobra, where the deodars shadow hardly
any scandal at all, and the Snows come, with perceptible confidence, a
little nearer.

'They almost step,' she said to Brookes, looking at them, 'out of the
realm of the imagination.'

Brookes said that they did indeed, and hoped that she hadn't by any
chance forgotten the mustard.

'The wind is keen off the glaciers over there--anybody would think of a
condiment,' Miss Anderson remarked in deprecation, and to this Brookes
made no response. It was a liberty she often felt compelled to take.

The Snows appealed to Madeline even more than did Carintha, Countess
of Fleetwood, to whose fortunes she gave long pauses while she looked
across their summits at renunciation, and fancied her spirit made strong
and equal to its task. She was glad of their sanctuary; she did not know
where she should find such another. Perhaps the spectacle was more than
ever sublime in its alternative to the one she had come away to postpone
the sight of; at all events it drove the reunion of the Inneses from her
mind several times for five minutes together, during which she thought
of Horace by himself, and went over, by way of preparation for her
departure, all that had come and gone between them. There had been
luminous moments, especially as they irradiated him, and she dwelt on
these. There was no reason why she should not preserve in London or in
New York a careful memory of them.

So the lights were twinkling all up and down and round about Simla
when she cantered back to it and it was late when she started for the
Worsleys, where she was dining. One little lighted house looked much
like another perche