vival of 'bachelor
habits' within six months of marriage; and more than once--waking in
the small hours to find herself alone--she had slipped on her
dressing-gown and boldly invaded his study; a disarming vision enough,
her face flushed with sleep, looking absurdly young in a halo of
tumbled hair, her eyes alight with tenderness and enjoyment of her own
daring. On each occasion she was reproved without severity;
established herself in the deck-lounge of old days; fell asleep
promptly, and was carried protesting back to bed; but not until she had
seen the lamp put out and the detestable litter of papers tidied up for
the night.

In this fashion the first half of March slipped uneventfully by, each
day bringing with it that imperceptible advance of heat which strikes
an undernote of dread through the rose-scented languor of a Punjab
March. For in the vast Northern Plains of India, it is autumn, not
spring, that bears the winged word of resurrection. But Quita was
still at that enviable stage in love's progress when times and seasons
and places shrink to mere pin-points beside the one supreme fact. A
Frontier hot weather in Eldred's company held no terrors for her.
Possibly two months' leave would be available later on, when they would
spend the honeymoon--of which they had been twice defrauded--in
Kashmir; and, in the meantime, so long as one roof covered them, all
was well; in spite of her secret wish that Tibet and the Pamirs could
be expunged from the map of Asia by means of a private deluge!

But if Quita were inclined to quarrel with her husband's industry, Max
Richardson was not. He was enjoying, for the first time in his life,
the mere pleasantness of a woman's intimate companionship;--in Quita's
case a companionship full of incident, of delicate reticences,
alternating with unexpected revelations of thought and feeling; and
through it all a frank interest in everything that concerned himself,
which is perhaps the subtlest form of coquetry. Not that Quita meant
it as such. In her entire devotion to her husband, she simply did not
consider her effect upon other men; to whom, in consequence, she showed
her true self almost with the freedom and spontaneity of a child.
Richardson's own simplicity of character, and the ease with which one
slips into a pleasant path, helped matters forward; and before long,
they had fallen quite naturally into the habit of riding or driving
together when Lenox happened to be