her finger sixteen months before.

She lay in it now, propped up among frilled pillows, an etherealised
edition of herself; her hair divided into two plaits, one lying over
each shoulder; the sweeping curve of her lashes shadowing her cheek;
her eyes resting on a small dark head that nestled in the hollow of her
arm. For, to Quita's intense satisfaction, the child had Eldred's
black hair, and the clear Northern eyes that held all she knew, or as
yet cared to know, of heaven.

Her delight at the inadequate tidings of her husband was greater than
Honor had dared to expect. For she could not know how the wakeful
night watches, and the hours of enforced quiet, had been haunted by
that nightmare dread of the mountains, which Eldred's expurgated
accounts of certain vicissitudes had justified rather than dispelled.
But now--now he was through the worst of them, within easy distance of
Kashmir; and she felt as a prisoner may feel when the doors swing wide,
and he finds himself once more lord of light and space.

"Oh, Baby, think of it!" she whispered in ecstasy to the unheeding
morsel of life in her arms. "He is coming--actually coming! Nothing
can delay him very long now."

But the slow days multiplied into weeks; and still he did not come; and
the scanty news from Kashmir was not hopeful enough to be passed on to
her--yet. Then, as she grew stronger, and more openly bewildered at
the silence and delay, Desmond decided to speak to her himself. And
while the tale was still upon his lips, while Quita sat listening to
it, white and tearless, his hand grasping her own, a merciful fate
brought her an envelope quaveringly addressed in pencil, containing
word of definite progress at last, and an assurance that once he could
set foot to ground nothing should hold him back.

Ten days later the message, "Starting this morning," flashed through
space to Dera Ishmael from Kashmir; and after that each hour brought
him nearer. A second flash from Lahore; a third from Jhung; and
Desmond, sending on a spare horse, rode down to the Indus to meet his
friend, in Oriental fashion, 'at the edge of the carpet.'

It was a gaunt, weather-beaten figure of a man that stepped out of the
ferry-boat and grasped his hand; but there was that in his bearing and
in his unshadowed eyes that told Desmond the chief of what he wished to
know. For the rest, the greeting between them was of their race and
kind.

"Well, old chap, how are you?"

"D