rld, and Polkington an uncommon name. "Why not choose
something simple, like 'Gray'?" she suggested.

"Because," Julia answered, "that is what I am not."

* * * * *

But fate had one exceedingly bitter pill for Mrs. Polkington. On the
day after Cherie and her husband sailed for South Africa, it was known
in Marbridge that the news of Mr. Harding's engagement was false. The
girl gossip had coupled with him was engaged, it is true, and to a Mr.
Harding, but to another and entirely different bearer of the name. The
real, eligible Mr. Harding called at East Street to explain to Mrs.
Polkington how the mistake had arisen, to tell her that he himself had
been away in the north for some weeks and so had heard nothing of it.
Also to hear--and he had heard nothing of that either--that Cherie was
married and gone.

The news of Mr. Harding's freedom and his call, and what she fancied
it might have implied, did not reach Cherie till after her arrival in
Africa. It did not tend to soothe the first weeks of married life, nor
to make easier the rigorous, but no doubt wholesome, breaking-in
process to which her husband wisely subjected her.

CHAPTER XV

THE GOOD COMRADE

Rawson-Clew was very busy that autumn, so busy that the events which
had taken place in Holland were rather blotted out of his mind; he had
not exactly forgotten them, only among the press of other things he
did not often think about them and they soon came to take their proper
unimportant place among his recollections. Julia he thought of
occasionally, but less and less in connection with the foolish
holiday, more in connection with some chance saying or doing. Things
recalled her, a passage in a book, a sentiment she would have shared,
an opinion she would have combated. Or perhaps it was that some one he
met set him thinking of her shrewd swift judgments; some scene in
which he played a part that made him imagine her an amused spectator
of its unconscious absurdity. He had turned her thyme flowers out of
his pocket; he had no sentiment about them or her, but he did not
forget her; their acquaintance had, to a certain extent, been a thing
of mind, and in mind it seemed he occasionally came in contact with
her still. Also there is no doubt she must have been one of those
virile people who take hold, for though one could sometimes overlook
her presence, in absence one did not forget.

Of herself and her doings he never h