line heard this as plainly as they did. She noted disdainfully how
it all fell in.

'How absent you are tonight!' Horace Innes exclaimed, when Miss Anderson
had asked him a trivial question for the third time.

'Hush!' she said. 'Mrs. Scallepa is going to sing;' and as Mrs. Scallepa
sang she let her eyes play over him with a light in them so tender, that
once catching it the felt a sudden answering throb, and looked again;
but after that her eyes were on the floor.

'We are staying here,' he said a quarter of an hour later, as he saw her
into her rickshaw; 'and I think I must see you to your quarters. It's
very dark, and there is an ugly little slip half-way between this and
the Mall.

He ran upstairs to get his coat and stick, and a white face like an
apparition suddenly hung itself on the edge of Madeline's rickshaw-hood.

'Don't tell him tonight,' it said, hoarsely.

'Are you ready, Colonel Innes? Then good night, everybody,' cried
Madeline.

She was not at all sure that she would not tell Horace Innes 'tonight'.

Chapter 3.V.

'My wife,' said Colonel Innes, 'is looking extremely well.'

'She seems so, indeed,' Madeline replied.

'She is delighted with "Two Gables". Likes it better, she says, than any
other house we could have got.'

'What a good thing!'

'It was a record trip for the Caledonia, thirteen days from Brindisi to
Bombay. Was she telling you about the voyage?'

'No,' said Madeline impatiently, 'she didn't mention it. How shall I
tell the men to put down the hood, please? A rickshaw is detestable with
the hood up--stifling! Thanks. I beg your pardon. The Caledonia made a
good run?'

'Thirteen days. Wonderful weather, of course, which was luck for Violet.
She is an atrocious sailor.'

Madeline fancied she heard repose and reassurance in his voice.
Her thought cried, 'It is not so bad as he expected!' We can not be
surprised that she failed to see in herself the alleviation of that
first evening.

'She has brought quantities of things for the house with her,' Innes
went on, 'as well as three dachshund puppies,' and he laughed. 'Wouldn't
you like one? What can we do with three--and the terrier, and Brutus?'

'Oh, thank you, no.'

How could he laugh? How could he speak pleasantly of these intimate
details of his bondage? How could he conceive that she would accept--

'Already she has arranged four dinner-parties! It will be a relief not
to have to think of that sort of thing--to b