from India."

"Poor devil!" The words rushed from Sandy's lips. "How rotten
everything is!" he added fiercely, with youth's instinctive revolt
against the inevitableness of life's pains and penalties.

"And I've hardly mended matters, have I?" she submitted rather bitterly.

He slipped a friendly arm round her neck.

"Don't you worry any," he said, with gruff sympathy. "Mallory's fixed
up everything--and it all dovetails in neatly with Kitty's saying you
were staying with friends for the night. You're staying _here_--do you
see? And Mallory and the mater between 'em have settled that you're to
prolong your visit for a couple of days--to give more colour to the
proceedings, so to speak! You'll emerge without a stain on your
character!" he went on, trying with boyish clumsiness to cheer her up.

"Oh, don't, Sandy!" Her lip quivered. "I--I don't think I mind much
about that. I feel as if I'd stained my soul."

"Well, if there were no blacker souls around than yours, old thing, the
world would be a darned sight nicer place to live in! And that's that."

Nan contrived a smile.

"Sandy, you're rather a dear!" she said gratefully.

And then Peter came in, and Sandy hastened to make himself scarce.

A dead silence followed his hurried exit. Nan found herself trembling,
and for a moment she dared not lift her eyes to Peter's face for fear
of what she might read there. At last:

"Peter," she said, without looking at him. "Are you still--angry with
me?"

"What makes you think I am angry?"

She looked up at that, then shrank back from the bitter hardness in his
face almost as though he had dealt her a blow.

"Oh, you are--you are!" she cried tremulously.

"Don't you think most men would be in the same circumstances?"

"I don't understand," she said very low.

"No? I suppose you wouldn't," he replied. "You don't seem to
understand the meaning of the word--faithfulness. Perhaps you can't
help it--you're half a Varincourt! . . . Don't you realise what you've
done? You've torn down our love and soiled it--made it nothing! I
believed in you as I believed in God. . . . And then you run away with
Maryon Rooke! One man or another--apparently it's all the same to you."

She rose and drew rather timidly towards him.

"Has it--hurt you--like that?" she said whisperingly. "You didn't
mind--about Roger. Not in the same way."

"_Mind_?"

The word came hoarsely, and his hands, hanging loosely at his