e a talk
with Miss Meredith before we start. You both looked so absorbed that
she begged me not to interrupt! I ought to have introduced her to you
before starting, Miss Meredith. She's the wife of our acting Civil
Surgeon and quite an old friend of yours, it seems. Will you come?"

The girl rose and turned to Wyndham with a friendly smile. "You and I
can have our talk out another time, can't we?"

"By all means."

He sat watching her as she left him, with a tender concentration of
gaze, his brain stunned by a glimpse into undreamed-of possibilities;
into a region of life whereof he knew nothing, and had believed
himself content to know nothing all his days.

Mrs Jim Conolly was a large woman, nearer forty than thirty. Twenty
years of India, of hot weathers resolutely endured, of stretching
small means to the utmost limit and beyond it, had left their mark, in
sallowness of skin, in broken lines of thought between her brows, and
of restrained endurance about her firmly-closed lips. She had the air
of a woman who has never allowed herself to be worsted by the minor
miseries of life; and in India the minor miseries multiply
exceedingly. Unthinking observers stigmatised her face as harsh and
unprepossessing; but it was softened and illumined by a glow of
genuine welcome as she greeted Honor Meredith.

"I wonder if you have the smallest recollection of me?" she said. "My
last glimpse of you was in a dak gharri at Pindi, when you were first
starting for home nineteen years ago, and the sight of what you have
grown into makes me feel a very old woman indeed! Do you remember
those Pindi days at all?"

"Bits, here and there, quite vividly. I had been wondering already why
I seemed to know your face. It was you who had the two nice babies I
loved so dearly. Haven't you any for me to play with now?"

"Yes, my two youngest are still with me. But they are rather big
babies by this time. You must come over and see them soon, and we will
pick up the threads of our dropped friendship, Honor. Your father and
mother were very good to me in the old days, but you were my chief
friend from the start. You have grown into a very beautiful woman,
dear," she added, in a lower tone; "and if you ever want help or
advice while you are here alone, I hope you will turn to me for it as
readily as you would to your own mother. I haven't seen Lady Meredith
for years. Sit down under the cliff with me, and give me some news of
them all."

By