sonable fit of jealousy. She smoothed him down as though he had
been a spoilt child, her own attitude supremely unabashed; and though he
could not be angry with her, an uneasy sense of doubt pressed upon him.
Utterly his own as he knew her to be, yet dimly, intangibly, he began to
wonder what her outlook on life could be, how she regarded the tie that
bound them. It was impossible to reason seriously with her. She floated
out of his reach at the first touch.

So that curious honeymoon of theirs continued, love and passion crudely
mingled, union without knowledge, flaming worship and blind possession.

"You are happy?" Merryon asked her once.

To which she made ardent answer, "Always happy in your arms, O king."

And Merryon was happy also, though, looking back later, it seemed to him
that he snatched his happiness on the very edge of the pit, and that
even at the time he must have been half-aware of it.

When, a month after her coming, the scourge of the Plains caught her, as
was inevitable, he felt as if his new-found kingdom had begun already to
depart from him.

For a few days Puck was seriously ill with malaria. She came through it
with marvellous resolution, nursed by Merryon and his bearer, the
general factotum of the establishment.

But it left her painfully weak and thin, and the colonel became again
furiously insistent that she should leave the Plains till the rains were
over.

Merryon, curiously enough, did not insist. Only one evening he took the
little wasted body into his arms and begged her--actually begged her--to
consent to go.

"I shall be with you for the first fortnight," he said. "It won't be
more than a six-weeks' separation."

"Six weeks!" she protested, piteously.

"Perhaps less," he said. "I may be able to come to you for a day or two
in the middle. Say you will go--and stay, sweetheart! Set my mind at
rest!"

"But, darling, you may be ill. A thousand things may happen. And I
couldn't go back to Shamkura. I couldn't!" said Puck, almost crying,
clinging fast around his neck.

"But why not?" he questioned, gently. "Weren't they kind to you there?
Weren't you happy?"

She clung faster. "Happy, Billikins! With that hateful Captain Silvester
lying in wait to--to make love to me! I didn't tell you before. But
that--that was why I left."

He frowned above her head. "You ought to have told me before, Puck."

She trembled in his arms. "It didn't seem to matter when once I'd got
away;