ve an awkward little laugh, extremely conscious of the
factory clothes.

"Oh, yes; I'm all right," he said. "I was going to start this evening."

The girl stood behind them, with a flush slowly fading from her face.
There are some women who become suddenly beautiful--not by the glory of
a beautiful thought, not by the exaltation of a lofty virtue, but by the
mere practical human flush. Jack Meredith, when he took his eyes from
Durnovo's, glancing at Jocelyn, suddenly became aware of the presence of
a beautiful woman.

The crisis was past; and if Jack knew it, so also did Jocelyn. She knew
that the imperturbable gentlemanliness of the Englishman had conveyed
to the more passionate West Indian the simple, downright fact that in a
lady's drawing-room there was to be no raised voice, no itching fingers,
no flash of fiery eyes.

"Yes," he said, "that will suit me splendidly. We will travel together."

He turned to Jocelyn.

"I hear your brother is away?"

"Yes, for a few days. He has gone up the coast."

Then there was a silence. They both paused, helping each other as if by
pre-arrangement, and Victor Durnovo suddenly felt that he must go. He
rose, and picked up the whip which he had dropped on the matting. There
was no help for it--the united wills of these two people were too strong
for him.

Jack Meredith passed out of the verandah with him, murmuring something
about giving him a leg up. While they were walking round the house,
Victor Durnovo made one of those hideous mistakes which one remembers
all through life with a sudden rush of warm shame and self-contempt. The
very thing that was uppermost in his mind to be avoided suddenly bubbled
to his lips, almost, it would seem, in defiance of his own will.

"What about the small--the small-pox?" he asked.

"We have got it under," replied Jack quietly. "We had a very bad time
for three days, but we got all the cases isolated and prevented it from
spreading. Of course, we could do little or nothing to save them; they
died."

Durnovo had the air of a whipped dog. His mind was a blank. He simply
had nothing to say; the humiliation of utter self-contempt was his.

"You need not be afraid to come back now," Jack Meredith went on, with a
strange refinement of cruelty.

And that was all he ever said about it.

"Will it be convenient for you to meet me on the beach at four o'clock
this afternoon?" he asked, when Durnovo was in the saddle.

"Yes."

"All right--f