rence for an Englishman, had a reasonable estimate of her husband's
weaknesses. She managed him tenderly, and became, in less than a year, a
very passable imitation of an English lady in dress and carriage. [It
is curious to think that a Hill man, after a lifetime's education, is
a Hill man still; but a Hill woman can in six months master most of the
ways of her English sisters. There was a coolie woman once. But that is
another story.] Dunmaya dressed by preference in black and yellow, and
looked well.
Meantime the letter lay in Agnes's desk, and now and again she would
think of poor resolute hard-working Phil among the cobras and tigers of
Darjiling, toiling in the vain hope that she might come back to him. Her
husband was worth ten Phils, except that he had rheumatism of the
heart. Three years after he was married--and after he had tried Nice
and Algeria for his complaint--he went to Bombay, where he died, and set
Agnes free. Being a devout woman, she looked on his death and the
place of it, as a direct interposition of Providence, and when she had
recovered from the shock, she took out and reread Phil's letter with the
"etc., etc.," and the big dashes, and the little dashes, and kissed it
several times. No one knew her in Bombay; she had her husband's income,
which was a large one, and Phil was close at hand. It was wrong and
improper, of course, but she decided, as heroines do in novels, to find
her old lover, to offer him her hand and her gold, and with him spend
the rest of her life in some spot far from unsympathetic souls. She sat
for two months, alone in Watson's Hotel, elaborating this decision, and
the picture was a pretty one. Then she set out in search of Phil Garron,
Assistant on a tea plantation with a more than usually unpronounceable
name.
. . . . . . . . .
She found him. She spent a month over it,, for his plantation was not in
the Darjiling district at all, but nearer Kangra. Phil was very little
altered, and Dunmaya was very nice to her.
Now the particular sin and shame of the whole business is that Phil, who
really is not worth thinking of twice, was and is loved by Dunmaya,
and more than loved by Agnes, the whole of whose life he seems to have
spoilt.
Worst of all, Dunmaya is making a decent man of him; and he will be
ultimately saved from perdition through her training.
Which is manifestly unfair.
FALSE DAWN.
To-night God knows what thing
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