knowing that he had spoken.

'Goodbye,' she said; 'I am going away--immediately. It will be better.
And listen--I have known this for weeks--and I have gone on seeing you.
And I hope I am not any more wicked than I feel. Goodbye.'

'Goodbye,' he said, taking his hand from the pony's neck, and she rode
buoyantly away. He, turning to breast the road again, saw darkness
gathering over the end of it, and drawing nearer.

At eleven o'clock next morning Brookes rose from her packing to take
a note addressed to her mistress from the hand of a messenger in the
Imperial red and gold. It ran:

'Dear Miss Anderson--I write to tell you that I have obtained three
weeks' leave, and I am going into the interior to shoot, starting this
afternoon. You spoke yesterday of leaving Simla almost immediately. I
trust you will not do this, as it would be extremely risky to venture
down to the Plains just now. In ten days the rains will have broken,
when it will be safe. Pray wait till then.

'Yours sincerely,

'Horace Innes.'

Involuntarily the letter found its way to Madeline's lips, and remained
there until she saw the maid observing her with intelligence.

'Brookes,' she said, 'I am strongly advised not to start until the rains
break. I think, on the whole, that we won't.'

'Indeed, miss,' returned Brookes, 'Mrs. Sergeant Simmons told me that
it was courting cholera to go--and nothing short of it. I must say I'm
thankful.'

Chapter 3.X.

A week later Colonel Innes had got his leave, and had left Simla for the
snow-line by what is facetiously known as 'the carriage road to Tibet.'
Madeline had done as she was bidden, and was waiting for the rains to
break. Another day had come without them. To write and tell Innes, to
write to tell Violet, to go away and leave the situation as she
found it; she had lived and moved and slept and awakened to these
alternatives. At the moment she slept.

It was early, very early in the morning. The hills all about seemed
still unaware of it, standing in the greyness, compact, silent,
immutable, as if they slept with their eyes open. Nothing spoke of the
oncoming sun, nothing was yet surprised. The hill world lifted itself
unconscious in a pale solution of daylight, and only on the sky-line,
very far away, it rippled into a cloud. The flimsy town clinging steeply
roof above roof to the slope, mounting to the saddle and slipping over
on the other side, cut the dawn with innumerable little lines