hink you
will like it. I shall do this whether you come or no, for I want a quiet
time before I take up my nursing in Lahore. In thinking of all this will
you remember that I am not a girl but a woman. I shall be twenty-nine my
next birthday. Sincerely yours, VANNA LORING.

P.S. But I still think you would be wiser not to come. I hope to hear
you will not.

I replied only this:--Dear Miss Loring,--I think I understand the
position fully. I will be there. I thank you with all my heart.
Gratefully yours, STEPHEN CLIFDEN.

IV

Three days later I met Lady Meryon, and was swept in to tea. Her manner
was distinctly more cordial as she mentioned casually that Vanna had
left--she understood to take up missionary work--"which is odd," she
added with a woman's acrimony, "for she had no more in common with
missionaries than I have, and that is saying a good deal. Of course she
speaks Hindustani perfectly, and could be useful, but I haven't grasped
the point of it yet." I saw she counted on my knowing nothing of the
real reason of Vanna's going and left it, of course, at that. The talk
drifted away under my guidance. Vanna evidently puzzled her. She half
feared, and wholly misunderstood her.

No message came to me, as time went by, and for the time she had
vanished completely, but I held fast to her promise and lived on that
only.

I take up my life where it ceased to be a mere suspense and became life
once more.

On the 15th of June, I found myself riding into Srinagar in Kashmir,
through the pure tremulous green of the mighty poplars that hedge the
road into the city. The beauty of the country had half stunned me when
I entered the mountain barrier of Baramula and saw the snowy peaks that
guard the Happy Valley, with the Jhelum flowing through its tranquil
loveliness. The flush of the almond blossom was over, but the iris, like
a blue sea of peace had overflowed the world--the azure meadows smiled
back at the radiant sky. Such blossom! the blue shading into clear
violet, like a shoaling sea. The earth, like a cup held in the hand of a
god, brimmed with the draught of youth and summer and--love? But no, for
me the very word was sinister. Vanna's face, immutably calm, confronted
it.

That night I slept in a boat at Sopor, and I remember that, waking at
midnight, I looked out and saw a mountain with a gloriole of hazy silver
about it, misty and faint as a cobweb threaded with dew. The river,
there spreading into a la