unnecessary a luxury in India that the servants always leave it open.
She swung the stiff halves together.

'Now,' she said, 'it is shut.'

'And I,' said Somers Chichele, softly and quickly, 'am on the other
side.'

Even over that depth she could flash him a smile. 'It is the business of
my life,' she gave him in return, 'to keep this gate shut.' I felt as
if they had forgotten us. Somers mounted and rode off without a word. We
were walking in a different direction. Looking back, I saw Judy leaning
immovable on the gate, while Somers turned in his saddle, apparently
to repeat the form of lifting his hat. And all about them stretched
the stones of Kabul valley, vague and formless in the tide of the
moonlight...

Next day a note from Mrs. Harbottle informed me that she had gone to
Bombay for a fortnight. In a postscript she wrote, 'I shall wait for the
Chicheles there, and come back with them.' I remember reflecting that
if she could not induce herself to take a passage to England in the ship
that brought them, it seemed the right thing to do.

She did come back with them. I met the party at the station. I knew
Somers would meet them, and it seemed to me, so imminent did disaster
loom, that someone else should be there, someone to offer a covering
movement or a flank support wherever it might be most needed. And among
all our smiling faces disaster did come, or the cold premonition of it.
We were all perfect, but Somers's lip trembled. Deprived for a fortnight
he was eager for the draft, and he was only twenty-six. His lip
trembled, and there, under the flickering station-lamps, suddenly stood
that of which there never could be again any denial, for those of us who
saw.

Did we make, I wonder, even a pretense of disguising the consternation
that sprang up among us, like an armed thing, ready to kill any further
suggestion of the truth? I don't know. Anna Chichele's unfinished
sentence dropped as if someone had given her a blow upon the mouth.
Coolies were piling the luggage into a hired carriage at the edge of the
platform. She walked mechanically after them, and would have stepped in
with it but for the sight of her own gleaming landau drawn up within a
yard or two, and the General waiting. We all got home somehow, taking it
with us, and I gave Lady Chichele twenty-four hours to come to me
with her face all one question and her heart all one fear. She came in
twelve.

'Have you seen it--long?' Prepared as I was