rose the sound of her voice.

He was too far away to hear what she was saying, and, parenthetically,
had he been nearer he would not have listened. But now the intonation,
the trailing accent of her speech affected him as a balm. The irritation
faded, as irritation ever does; he found some paper, and as, to the
accompaniment of her voice, he prepared to write one of those letters in
which punctuation is disregarded and sequence of idea forgot, he heard
her waving inflection cut by a harsher note. It was the general, he
knew. For the moment he wondered why he had not already gone to the
consulate, but presently the noise of hoofs, the creak of wheels, a
shrill cry, and the hiss of a whip seemed to announce that the
conveyance which took the consul each morning to Siak was at the door.

Tancred's window did not give on the road, but on the coppice and the
pavilion, yet when again he caught the creak of wheels it demanded
little imagination on his part to picture the general sitting bolt
upright in a gharry, driving to the sun-smitten town beyond. And as the
clatter of hoofs fainted in the distance, Tancred took up the pen again.
The letter which he then succeeded in producing was one similar to what
we have all of us written and all of us received--a clear call of love,
in which the words are less jotted than shaken from the end of the pen.
Its transcription here is needless.

A love-letter which can pleasure anyone save the recipient proceeds not
from the heart but the head. Moreover, when Tancred began it he had not
the faintest idea what he intended to say, and when it was finished he
did not remember what he had written. Oh, sweethearts and swains! mind
ye of this: when a love-letter differs from that, it emanates from a
poet or a fraud. Tancred was neither. He was simply a young man suddenly
enthralled by the charm of a woman older than himself. He intended no
wrong, and if you or I or any other implacable moralist had happened
that way and told him, as would have been our duty, that he was
betraying the sacredest of trusts, the confidence of a host, he would
have exhibited the surprise of a child frowned at for innocent prattle.
Bear with him then; of wrong he intended none. It is the essence of
crime that it be committed with malice aforethought, that the intention
to commit it be clear. In the present case the intention was wholly
lacking. Tancred was carried along by one of those unreasoning impulses
which the