onant loud is the speech of Words and profitable their
investment in the Mutual Alliance Bank.

"_Love me, love my Dog?_" Yes--and look to the dog for a dog's
reward.

"_Do not show me that you love me--tell me so._" Far too true and
pregnant ever to become a proverb.

Colonel de Warrenne had omitted to tell his wife so--after she had
accepted him--and she had died thinking herself loveless, unloved, and
stating the fact.

This was the bitterest drop in the bitter cup of the big, dumb,
well-meaning man.

And now she would never know....

She had thought herself unloved, and, nerve-shattered by her terrible
experience with the snake, had made no fight for life when the
unwanted boy was born. For the sake of a girl she would have striven
to live--but a boy, a boy can fend for himself (and takes after his
father)....

Almost as soon as Lenore Seymour Stukeley had landed in India (on a
visit with her sister Yvette to friends at Bimariabad), delighted,
bewildered, depolarized, Colonel Matthew Devon de Warrenne had burst
with a blaze of glory into her hitherto secluded, narrow life--a great
pale-blue, white-and-gold wonder, clanking and jingling, resplendent,
bemedalled, ruling men, charging at the head of thundering
squadrons--a half-god (and to Yvette he had seemed a whole-god).

He had told her that he loved her, told her once, and had been
accepted.

_Once_! Only once told her that he loved her, that she was beautiful,
that he was hers to command to the uttermost. Only once! What could
_she_ know of the changed life, the absolute renunciation of pleasant
bachelor vices, the pulling up short, and all those actions that speak
more softly than words?

What could she know of the strength and depth of the love that could
keep such a man as the Colonel from the bar, the bridge-table, the
race-course and the Paphian dame? Of the love that made him walk
warily lest he offend one for whom his quarter of a century, and more,
of barrack and bachelor-bungalow life, made him feel so utterly unfit
and unworthy? What could she know of all that he had given up and
delighted to give up--now that he truly loved a true woman? The
hard-living, hard-hearted, hard-spoken man had become a gentle
frequenter of his wife's tea-parties, her companion at church, her
constant attendant--never leaving the bungalow, save for duty, without
her.

To those who knew him it was a World's Marvel; to her, who knew him
not, it was nothing at a