our wife?"

"That's what I don't know, sir." Feverishly Merryon made answer. "I left
her last night.

She was well then. But since--I sent down an orderly over an hour ago.
He's not come back."

"Confound it!" said the colonel, testily. "You'd better go yourself."

Merryon glanced swiftly round.

"Yes, go, go!" the colonel reiterated, irritably. "I'll relieve you for
a spell. Go and satisfy yourself--and me! None but an infernal fool
would have kept her here," he added, in a growling undertone, as Merryon
lifted a hand in brief salute and started away through the sodden mists.

He went as he had never gone in his life before, and as he went the
mists parted before him and a blinding ray of sunshine came smiting
through the gap like the sword of the destroyer. The simile rushed
through his mind and out again, even as the grey mist-curtain closed
once more.

He reached the bungalow. It stood like a shrouded ghost, and the drip,
drip, drip of the rain on the veranda came to him like a death-knell.

A gaunt figure met him almost on the threshold, and he recognized his
messenger with a sharp sense of coming disaster. The man stood mutely at
the salute.

"Well? Well? Speak!" he ordered, nearly beside himself with anxiety.
"Why didn't you come back with an answer?"

The man spoke with deep submission. "_Sahib_, there was no answer."

"What do you mean by that? What the--

Here, let me pass!" cried Merryon, in a ferment. "There must have
been--some sort of answer."

"No, _sahib_. No answer." The man spoke with inscrutable composure. "The
_mem-sahib_ has not come back," he said. "Let the _sahib_ see for
himself."

But Merryon had already burst into the bungalow; so he resumed his
patient watch on the veranda, wholly undisturbed, supremely patient.

The _khitmutgar_ came forward at his master's noisy entrance. There was
a trace--just the shadow of a suggestion--of anxiety on his dignified
face under the snow-white turban. He presented him with a note on a
salver with a few murmured words and a deep salaam.

"For the _sahib's_ hands alone," he said.

Merryon snatched up the note and opened it with shaking hands.

It was very brief, pathetically so, and as he read a great emptiness
seemed to spread and spread around him in an ever-widening desolation.

"Good-bye, my Billikins!" Ah, the pitiful, childish scrawl she had made
of it! "I've come to my senses, and I've gone back to him. I'm not
worthy of any sacri