too intent on the matter in hand to
turn to side issues. "If you don't mind giving me your opinion on the
subject--do you think it possible that the woman Tochatti is the one to
blame?"

"Well----" Major Carstairs sat down as he spoke, and since Chloe had
already taken her accustomed seat in a corner of the big couch, Anstice
followed their joint example. "Personally I have never been able to
conquer a dislike, which I always put down as absolutely unjust and
uncharitable, for the woman. I know she has served my wife faithfully,
and her devotion to our little daughter has been beyond praise. But"--he
smiled rather deprecatingly--"even ten years in India haven't
apparently cured me of British insularity, and I have never liked
foreigners--especially half-breeds such as Tochatti, Italian on one
side, English on the other."

"Then you think it possible, at least, that she may be the culprit?"

"I do, quite possible. And I thank God from the bottom of my heart for
the bare possibility," returned Major Carstairs deliberately, and his
words and manner both served to assure Anstice that at last this man had
been brought to believe, wholeheartedly, in his wife's innocence.

Anstice never knew, either then or afterwards, exactly how the miracle
had come about. Indeed, so subtle are the workings of a man's heart, so
complex and incomprehensible the thoughts and motives which touch a soul
to finer issues, that it is quite possible Major Carstairs himself could
not have told how or when he first began to realize that his judgment
might well be at fault, that his own stern honesty and unflinching
integrity, which would not permit him to subscribe outwardly to a belief
which inwardly he did not hold, might after all have been
stumbling-blocks in the way of true understanding rather than the
righteous bulwarks which he had fancied them.

Probably the conviction that he had misjudged his wife had been stealing
imperceptibly into Major Carstairs' mind during many lonely days spent
on the Indian Frontier; and though he could never have stated with any
degree of certainty the exact moment in which he understood, at last,
that his wife, the woman he had married, the mother of his child, was
incapable of the action which a censorious and unkind world had been
ready to attribute to her, when once that conviction entered his honest,
logical, if somewhat stubborn mind, it had found a home there for ever.

His chance meeting with Anstice