youth, and I felt old as I looked at her. One might
be eighty and share that passionate impersonal joy. Age could not wither
nor custom stale the infinite variety of her world's joys. She had a
child's dewy youth in her eyes.

There are great sunsets at Peshawar, flaming over the plain, dying in
melancholy splendour over the dangerous hills. They too were hers, in
a sense in which they could never be mine. But what a companion! To
my astonishment a wild thought of marriage flashed across me, to be
instantly rebuffed with a shrug. Marriage--that one's wife might talk
poetry to one about the East! Absurd! But what was it these people felt
and I could not feel? Almost, shut up in the prison of self, I knew what
Vanna had felt in her village--a maddening desire to escape, to be a
part of the loveliness that lay beyond me. So might a man love a king's
daughter in her hopeless heights.

"It may be very beautiful on the surface," I said morosely; "but there's
a lot of misery below--hateful, they tell me."

"Of course. We shall get to work one day. But look at the sunset. It
opens like a mysterious flower. I must take Winifred home now."

"One moment," I pleaded; "I can only see it through your eyes. I feel it
while you speak, and then the good minute goes."

She laughed.

"And so must I. Come, Winifred. Look, there's an owl; not like the owls
in the summer dark in England--

"Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping, Wavy in the
dark, lit by one low star."

Suddenly she turned again and looked at me half wistfully.

"It is good to talk to you. You want to know. You are so near it all. I
wish I could help you; I am so exquisitely happy myself."

My writing was at a standstill. It seemed the groping of a blind man
in a radiant world. Once perhaps I had felt that life was good in
itself--when the guns came thundering toward the Vimy Ridge in a mad
gallop of horses, and men shouting and swearing and frantically urging
them on. Then, riding for more than life, I had tasted life for an
instant. Not before or since. But this woman had the secret.

Lady Meryon, with her escort of girls and subalterns, came daintily past
the hotel compound, and startled me from my brooding with her pretty
silvery voice.

"Dreaming, Mr. Clifden? It isn't at all wholesome to dream in the East.
Come and dine with us tomorrow. A tiny dance afterwards, you know; or
bridge for those who like it."

I had not the faintest notion whethe