him that there was a still
greater gulf between him and her.

"To-morrow I and two coolies are going up to Gujerat where the
famine is. I inclose a snapshot of the party. My effacement by the
coolie is merely a photographic freak--his grin is the broadest part
of him, poor fellow. In the autumn I go down to Bombay. I am deep in
bacteriology, which reminds me of father and the first time I met
you, and your bad puns."

The snapshot was an unflattering likeness of Frida in a 'rickshaw.
The foreground was filled by the figure of the grinning coolie.
Behind him Frida's face showed dim and small and far-off; she was
smiling with the sun in her eyes.

Such as it was he treasured it as his dearest possession. He had
been painting pictures all his life, but he had none of Frida.

Silence again. "In the autumn," she had said, "I go down to Bombay."
But the autumn passed and there was no news of her. Durant provided
himself with an Indian outfit. He was going out to look for her; he
was ready to go to the ends of the world to find her. "The day after
to-morrow," he said, "I shall start for Bombay."

That night he dreamed of her; or, rather, not of her, but of a
coolie who stood before the door of a wayside bungalow, and held in
his hands shafts that were not the shafts of a 'rickshaw. And the
coolie's face was all one broad grin.

Two days later--the day he was to have sailed for India--hurriedly
skimming a column of the _Times_ he came upon the news he was
looking for.

"It is with much regret that we record the death from bubonic plague
of Miss Frida Tancred. It was quite recently that this lady gave up
a large part of her fortune to founding the Bacteriological
Laboratory in Bombay, more recently still that she distinguished
herself by her services to the famine-stricken population of
Gujerat. Miss Tancred has added to the immense debt our Indian
Empire owes her by this final example of heroic self-sacrifice. It
is said that she contracted plague while nursing one of her coolies,
who has since recovered."

He bowed his head.

It was not grief he felt, but a savage exultant joy. The world could
have no more of her. She was his, in some inviolable, irrevocable
way. He knew. He understood her now, clearly and completely.

His joy deepened to a passionless spiritual content; as if in the
fulness of his knowledge he had embraced the immortal part of her.

Why had he not understood her long ago? She had never changed.