t--oh, I see--" exclaimed Markin. "You want to give them to the
Army! Well, in my capacity, on behalf of General Booth----"

"No," cried Laura, with sudden excitement, "not that either. I will give
them to nobody. But this is what I will do!" She seized the bracelet and
flung it far out into the opaline track of the vessel, and the smaller
objects, before her companion could stop her, followed it. Then he
caught her wrist.

"Stop!" he cried. "You've gone off your head--you've got fever. You're
acting wicked with that jewelry. Stop and let us reason it out
together."

She already had the turquoises, and with a jerk of her left hand she
freed it and threw them after the rest. The necklace caught the handrail
as it fell, and Markin made a vain spring to save it. He turned and
stared at Laura, who stood fighting the greatest puissance of feeling
she had known, looking at the pearls. As he stared, she kissed them
twice, and then, leaning over the ship's side, let them slowly slide out
of her fingers and fall, into the waves below. The moonlight gave them a
divine gleam as they fell. She turned to Markin with tears in her eyes.
"Now," she faltered, "I can be happy again. But not to-night."

CHAPTER XXVIII.

While the _Coromandel_ was throbbing out her regulation number of knots
toward Colombo, October was passing over Bengal. It went with lethargy,
the rains were too close on its heels; but at the end of the long hot
days, when the resplendent sun struck down on the glossy trees and the
over-lush Maidan, there often stole through Calcutta a breath of the
coming respite of December. The blue smoke of the people's cooking fires
began to hang again in the streets, the pungent smell of it was pleasant
in the still air. The south wind turned back at the Sunder-bunds;
instead of it, one met around corners a sudden crispness that stayed
just long enough to be recognised and melted damply away. A week might
have two or three of such promises and foretastes.

Hilda Howe, approaching the end of her probation at the Baker
Institution, threw the dormitory window wide to them, went out to seek
them. They brought her a new stirring of vitality, something deep within
her leaped up responding to the voucher the evenings brought that
presently they would bring something new and different. She vibrated to
an irrepressible pulse of accord with that: it made her hand strong and
her brain clear for the unimportant matters that remai