ained
volubly all the way along the veranda, and in the flood of his unknown
tongue Madeline caught a sentence or two.

'The memsahib was not,' said Surnoo. Clearly he could not deliver a
letter to a memsahib who was not. 'Therefore,' Surnoo continued, 'I have
brought back your honour's letter, and the other I had from the hand of
the memsahib's runner, the runner with one eye, who was on the road to
bring it here. More I do not know, but it appears that the memsahib has
gone to her father and mother in Belaat, being very sorrowful because
the Colonel-sahib has left her to shoot.'

'The letter will tell me,' said Madeline to herself, fingering it.
'Enough, Surnoo.'

The man went away, and Madeline closed and locked the door of her
sitting-room. The letter would tell her--what? She glanced about her
with dissatisfaction, and sought the greater privacy of her bedroom,
where also she locked the door and drew the muslin curtain across the
window. She laid the letter on the dressing-table and kept her eyes upon
it while she unfastened, with trembling hands, the brooch at her neck
and the belt at her waist. She did one or two other meaningless things,
as if she wanted to gain time, to fortify her nerves even against an
exhibition before herself.

Then she sat down with her back towards the light and opened the letter.
It had a pink look and a scented air. Even in her beating suspense
Madeline held it a little farther away from her, as she unfolded it, and
it ran:

'Dear Miss Anderson--What will you say, I wonder, and what will Simla
say, when you know that Captain Drake and I have determined to DISREGARD
CONVENTIONALITIES, and live henceforward only for one another! I am all
packed up, and long before this meets your eye we shall have taken
the step which society condemns, but which I have a feeling that
you, knowing my storm-tossed history, will be broad-minded enough
to sympathize with, at least to some extent. That is the reason I am
writing to you rather than to any of my own chums, and also of course to
have the satisfaction of telling you that I no longer care what you do
about letting out the secret of my marriage to Frederick Prendergast. I
am now ABOVE AND BEYOND IT. Any way you look at it, I do not see that I
am much to blame. As I never have been Colonel Innes's wife there can
be no harm in leaving him, though if he had ever been sympathetic, or
understood me the LEAST LITTLE BIT, I might have felt bound to h