Her eyes filled with vaguely resentful tears, which sprang,
if she could have traced them, from the fact that the man she loved was
loyal to his own mistake, and the formless premonition that he might
continue to be. She contorted her lip to keep her emotion back, and
deliberately turned away from a matter in which she was not mistress,
and which contained ugly possibilities of buffeting. She would wait a
little, and though consideration for Violet Prendergast had nothing to
do with it, she would not tell him tonight.

'I am sorry,' she said; and, after a moment, 'Did I tell you that I have
changed my plans?'

'You are not going so soon?' she took all the comfort there was in his
eagerness.

'I am not going at all for the present. I have abandoned my intentions
and my dates. I mean to drift for a little while. I have been too--too
conscientious.'

'Are you quite serious--do you mean it?'

'Indeed I do.'

'And in less than a fortnight you will not go out of one's life. You
will stay on--you summer day! It's hard to believe in luck like that. I
sent a poor devil of a sepoy a reprieve last week--one knows now how he
must have felt about it.'

'Does it make all that difference?' Madeline asked, softly.

'It makes a difference,' he answered, controlling his words, 'that I am
glad you can not conceive, since that would mean that your life has been
as barren as mine.' He seemed to refrain from saying more, and then he
added, 'You must be careful when you plant your friendship that you mean
it to stay, and blossom. It will not come easily up by the roots, and it
will leave an ugly hole.'

He was helping her out of her rickshaw, and as they followed the servant
who carried her wraps the few yards to the door, she left her hand
lightly on his arm. It was the seal, he thought, of her unwritten bond
that there should be no uprooting of the single flower he cherished; and
he went back almost buoyantly because of it to the woman who had been
sitting in the sackcloth and ashes of misfortune, turning over the
expedients for which his step might make occasion.

By the time the monkeys began to scramble about the roof in the early
creeping of the dawn among the deodars, Madeline had groped her way to
a tolerably clear conception of what might happen. The impeding
circumstance everywhere, it must be acknowledged, was Frederick
Prendergast's coffin. The case, had convict No. 1596 been still alive
and working out his debt to so