s cause, came on him
more and more thickly through all those hours of the dreary night.
They came, too, with a growing force, each one as it returned having
more the character of a waking dream, vivid almost to the point of
reality. But all ended alike. He always found himself breaking away
from Rosey in the veranda in the bungalow at Umballa, and could hear
again her cry of despair: "Oh, Gerry, Gerry! It is not as you think.
Oh, stay, stay! Give me a chance to show you how I love you!" The
tramp of his horse as he rode away from his home and that white figure
left prostrate in the veranda above him, became a real sound that beat
painfully upon his ears; and the voice of the friend he sought--an old
soldier in camp at Sabatoo, where he rode almost without a halt--as he
roused him in the dawn of the next day, came to him again almost as
though spoken in the room beside him: "Left _your_ wife, Palliser!
My God, sir! what's to come next?" And then the wicked hardness of
his own heart, and his stubborn refusal to listen to the angry
remonstrance that followed. "I tell you this, young man! the man's
a fool--a damned fool--that runs from the woman who loves him!" And the
asseveration that the speaker would say the same if she was anything
short of the worst character in camp, only in slightly different
words. His remorse for his own obduracy, and the cruelty of his
behaviour then; his shame when he thought of his application, months
later, to the Court at Lahore--for "relief" from Rosey: just imagine
it!--these were bad enough to think back on, even from the point of
view of his previous knowledge; but how infinitely worse when he
thought what she had been to him, how she had acted towards him two
years ago!

Even the painful adventure he could now look back to clearly, and with
a rather amused interest, as to an event with no laceration in it--his
wandering in an Australian forest, for how many days he could not
say, and his final resurrection at a town a hundred miles from his
starting-point--even this led him back in the end to the old story.
The whole passed through his mind like the scenes of a drama--his
confidence, having lost the track, that his horse, left to himself,
would find it again; his terror when, coming back from a stone's-throw
off, he found the tree deserted he had tied his horse to; his foolish
starting off to catch him, when the only sane course was to wait for
his return. But the second act of the dram