w the past three years and to speculate about the future. Not that
either was very rosy, especially the future.

The steady throb of the screw pulsated through the stuffy cabin, and
blended with the silence broken only by Molly's regular breathing in the
lower berth. Victoria could not help remembering other nights passed
also in a stuffy little cabin, where the screw was throbbing as
steadily, and when the silence was broken by breathing as regular, but a
little heavier. Three years only, and she was going home. But now she
was leaving behind her the high hopes she had brought with her.

She was no exception to the common rule, and memories, whether bitter or
sweet, had always bridged for her the gulf between wakefulness and
sleep. And what could be more natural than to recall those nights, three
years ago, when every beat of that steady screw was bringing her nearer
to the country where her young husband was, according to his mood, going
to win the V.C., trace the treasure stolen from a Begum, or become
military member on the Viceroy's Council? Poor old Dicky, she thought,
perhaps it was as well he did not live to see himself a major, old and
embittered, with all those hopes behind him.

There were no tears in her eyes when she thought of Fulton. The good old
days, the officers' ball at Lympton when she danced with him half the
night, the rutty lane where they met to sit on a bank of damp moss
smelling of earth and crushed leaves, and the crumbling little church
where she became Fulton's wife, all that was far away. How dulled it all
was too by those three years during which, in the hot moist air of the
plains, she had seen him degenerate, his skin lose it's freshness, his
eyelids pucker and gather pouches, his tongue grow ever more bitter as
he attempted to still with whisky the drunkard's chronic thirst. She
could not even shudder at the thought of all it had meant for her, at
the horror of seeing him become every day more stupefied, at the savage
outbursts of the later days, at the last scenes, crude and physically
foul. Three years had taught her brain dullness to such scenes as those.

The tragedy of Fulton was a common enough thing. Heat, idleness,
temporary affluence, all those things that do not let a man see that
life is blessed only by the works that enable him to forget it, had
played havoc with him. He had followed up his initial error of coming
into the world at all by marrying a woman who neither cajol