d order a nice dark tweed, or a grey. I'm not sure I
shan't like you best in grey. Anyway, we'll see."

The new clothes certainly made Jimmy look better, and, for a little
while, Lalage deluded herself into the belief that he really was growing
stronger; then one night he came home shivering, with a severe chill,
and his old enemy, the malaria, gripped him again. True, he was only
absent from the office two nights; but the trouble seemed to remain, and
Lalage had to redouble her efforts to feed him up. Often, during those
days, she tried to steel herself into sending him away, into forcing
him to go back to his own people to be nursed as they could afford to
nurse him; but when it came to the point of speaking, her resolution
always failed her. She could not bear to part from him--yet. And, if she
did send him away, there was always the fear, amounting almost to a
certainty, that he would drink to drown remembrance of her.

No, she told herself, she must keep him as long as she could, for his
own sake, as well as for hers. What would happen to herself if the
parting did come, she never tried to consider. The thought of it was too
awful. Jimmy had been so sweet and kind and thoughtful that it was
absolutely impossible for her to imagine anyone replacing him. The fact
that the question of marriage between them had been tacitly dropped did
not weigh with her now. She had never dared to hope that he would redeem
his promise eventually; and, latterly, she had tried to make herself
forget that the matter had ever been mentioned between them.

Jimmy had seen none of his own people since his visit to the Walter
Griersons'. His work gave him a good and sufficient excuse for not
leaving town, and it never occurred to him to call on either Henry or
Walter in the City. Still, he wrote frequently; and, as time went on,
he began to lose some of his fear of their discovering the existence of
Lalage. Neither Ida nor May seemed to have any suspicions, so far as he
could judge from their letters. Consequently, it gave him a terrible
shock when, one morning, about the beginning of his fourth month on the
_Record_, he received a wire from May commanding him to meet her as soon
as possible at Walter's office.

Lalage, who had gone deadly pale, picked up the detestable brown
envelope.

"It's addressed here. So they know," she whispered.

"Yes, they know," he repeated dully.

They sat for a long time in silence, then he got up, evident