.
Let us admire her--dear Judy.'

'Oh,' he said, with a fine air of detachment, 'do you think they are so
necessary, those agreements?'

'Well,' I replied, 'we see that they are not indispensable. More sugar?
I have only given you one lump. And we know, at all events,' I added,
unguardedly, 'that she could never have had an illusion about him.'

The young man looked up quickly. 'Is that story true?' he asked.

'There was a story, but most of us have forgotten it. Who told you?'

'The doctor.'

'The Surgeon-Major,' I said, 'has an accurate memory and a sense of
proportion. As I suppose you were bound to get it from somebody, I am
glad you got it from him.'

I was not prepared to go on, and saw with some relief that Somers was
not either. His silence, as he smoked, seemed to me deliberate; and I
had oddly enough at this moment for the first time the impression that
he was a man and not a boy. Then the Harbottles themselves joined us,
very cheery after a gallop from the Wazir-Bagh. We talked of old times,
old friendships, good swords that were broken, names that had carried
far, and Somers effaced himself in the perfect manner of the British
subaltern. It was a long, pleasant gossip, and I thought Judy seemed
rather glad to let her husband dictate its level, which, of course, he
did. I noticed when the three rode away together that the Colonel was
beginning to sit down rather solidly on his big New Zealander; and I
watched the dusk come over from the foothills for a long time thinking
more kindly than I had spoken of Robert Harbottle.

I have often wondered how far happiness is contributed to a temperament
like Judy Harbottle's, and how far it creates its own; but I doubt
whether, on either count, she found as much in any other winter of her
life except perhaps the remote ones by the Seine. Those ardent hours
of hers, when everything she said was touched with the flame of her
individuality, came oftener; she suddenly cleaned up her palate and
began to translate in one study after another the language of the
frontier country, that spoke only in stones and in shadows under the
stones and in sunlight over them. There is nothing in the Academy of
this year, at all events, that I would exchange for the one she gave me.
She lived her physical life at a pace which carried us all along
with her; she hunted and drove and danced and dined with such sincere
intention as convinced us all that in hunting and driving and dancin