"At least I am glad to have been of some small service to
you," he added, quietly. And before her brain or lips could formulate
an answer, he had cantered off and vanished round a shoulder of the
hill.

CHAPTER III.

"Flower o' the clove,
All the Latin I construe is 'Amo, I love'!"
--Browning.

Quita drew rein and sat motionless for several seconds, looking
straight before her.

"I wonder . . . I wonder very much," she mused, "exactly what one may
infer from all that. Either he has superb self-control, or I have been
wiped off the slate altogether. Most probably the latter."

Then she moved forward slowly, in a state of mind so complicated that,
for all her skill in self-analysis, she could not unravel her own
sensations. She only knew that she felt jarred through and through,
and in a mood to give way to her most dare-devil impulses. But happily
for her, no egregious piece of folly was ready to hand at the moment.

Her appearance in India was itself the outcome of an impulse generated
by the arrival of two cheques, whose united figures took away her
breath; and confirmed by the fact that Michael's relations with the
inevitable woman of the moment threatened serious complications--for
the woman. For Michael himself serious complications seemed out of all
question. Frank Pagan though he was, he lacked, in a peculiar degree,
the needful leavening of common clay. Love, as he knew it, was not
inevitably based on passion. It was his imagination rather than his
heart that took fire, and only under the influence of a dominant
emotion did he appear to be capable of the highest achievement.
Briefly, he was in love with Love, with that elixir of the heart that
stirs the pulses, and quickens inspiration. The object loved stood
second. But, so long as the enchantment held, so long as no new
impression caught and whirled him in another direction, he honestly
believed her to be supreme.

Hence complications, many and embarrassing, which went far to interpret
Quita's inconsequent flittings from one continental town to another.
For, although the younger by eighteen months, she was many years older
in thought and character than her irresponsible brother; and in all
matters of moment she took, and was expected to take, the lead.

The key to a perplexing character may often be found in the
idiosyncrasies of its nearest and dearest; and this reversal of the
natural order of things explained muc