uppence to me.'

I sought out Mrs. Harbottle, at the end of the room. She looked radiant;
she sat on the edge of the table and swung a light-hearted heel. She
was talking to people who in themselves were a witness to high spirits,
Captain the Hon. Freddy Gisborne, Mrs. Flamboys.

At sight of me her face clouded, fell suddenly into the old weary lines.
It made me feel somehow a little sick; I went back to my cart and drove
home.

For more than a week I did not see her except when I met her riding
with Somers Chichele along the peach-bordered road that leads to the
Wazir-Bagh. The trees were all in blossom and made a picture that might
well catch dreaming hearts into a beatitude that would correspond.
The air was full of spring and the scent of violets, those wonderful
Peshawur violets that grow in great clumps, tall and double. Gracious
clouds came and trailed across the frontier barrier; blue as an idyll it
rose about us; the city smiled in her gardens.

She had it all in her face, poor Judy, all the spring softness and more,
the morning she came, intensely controlled, to announce her defeat. I
was in the drawing-room doing the flowers; I put them down to look at
her. The wonderful telegram from Simla arrived--that was the wonderful
part--at the same time; I remembered how the red, white, and blue turban
of the telegraph peon bobbed up behind her shoulder in the veranda. I
signed and laid it on the table; I suppose it seemed hardly likely that
anything could be important enough to interfere at the moment with my
impression of what love, unbound and victorious, could do with a face I
thought I knew. Love sat there careless of the issue, full of delight.
Love proclaimed that between him and Judith Harbottle it was all
over--she had met him, alas, in too narrow a place--and I marvelled
at the paradox with which he softened every curve and underlined every
vivid note of personality in token that it had just begun. He sat there
in great serenity, and though I knew that somewhere behind lurked a
vanquished woman, I saw her through such a radiance that I could not be
sure of seeing her at all...

She went back to the very first of it; she seemed herself intensely
interested in the facts; and there is no use in pretending that, while
she talked, the moral consideration was at all present with me either;
it wasn't. Her extremity was the thing that absorbed us; she even,
in tender thoughtfulness, diagnosed it from its defini