It had been a long engagement, commenced by him between the ages of knickerbocker and tobacco, and encouraged by her as a development of the Prince Bountiful and Cinderella romances of the schoolroom. A charming contract, drawn up without sign and seal and cemented after the manner of barbaric hordes by heterogeneous offerings precious to the engaging parties, such as guinea-pigs, bird's eggs, looted apples, and, later on, prizes in vellum, deposited with blushing triumph into the concavity of a Dolly Varden pinafore. Parents wagged their heads and forbade, but the veto was conditional; the wisdom of the serpent was allied to a certain downiness of the dove, for hints at expectations in the future of the impecunious suitor necessitated an attitude both Janus-faced and revolving. Their perspicacity was duly rewarded, for later on the vacuous pockets of the young subaltern—he had gone to thicken the "thin red line"—became plethoric with inherited revenues of a deceased uncle on the mother's side, a personage for whom malt had been the Brahma of idolatry, who had laid up for himself a tidy treasure despite the corruptions of rust and moth.

No sooner were the legacy dues arranged than Victor Dorrien, in a letter beautifully ebullient if ungrammatical, demanded permission to import his chosen one to share a temporary exile in India where, for the nonce, he was tied by technical obligations. He vowed that celibacy was dull, and soldiering monotonous; and, moreover, that, without the sweetheart of his youth to tease and plague him, there would no glint on the avuncular guineas.

The letter was a hearty one, and went the round of the family circle to a chorus of satisfied praise. The chorus did it. Someone has said that "perpetual representation amounts to inculcation," and this phrase ably describes the uses of chorus. Continued reiteration makes gospel truth. The family chorus on the subject of matrimony is the mainstay of parental soloists, its note brings the recalcitrant or frisking lamb to "mark time," and subsequently dictates the pace of a quick march to the impending sacrifice. Social excitement is almost as sustaining as fanatical enthusiasm; it is the intoxicant which inflames half the actors that strut through the world's dramas of marriage, murder, or martyrdom. It sustained and inflamed little Elsie, who, dizzy with congratulations, valedictory gushings, present receiving, dress trying, and orange-blossom choosing, ignored the importance of life's destination in the enjoyment of the surrounding and immediate scenery. There was great leave-taking and kerchief-waving and some coursing of tears down kindred cheeks and noses as the bride-elect was deposited, with wedding-cake, dress, and addenda, on board the s.s. Kenilworth, in temporary charge of a passÉe matron of skittish proclivities and Anglo-Indian epidermis. This obliging lady had volunteered to personify decorum until arrival in Bombay, when her youthful charge would be transferred to the chaperonage of Dorrien's sister, on whom the observances of marriage etiquette depended. Elsie was in no way averse from the arrangement. All was so novel and so exciting that the Columbus instinct outbalanced the romantic one. The world had much to offer and the suburbs very little. There was certainly a well-grown curate, an Oxford man, ingrained with pedantry and pomposity, and delicately veneered with artistic ethics; also a retired bookmaker's son, who wore loud ties and restricted "unmentionables," and who spent money lavishly nursing a constituency, no one knew where. On the other hand stood Victor as she remembered him, sound in wind and limb, handsome, honest, and professedly devoted. Her choice was unhesitating, and she started forth with dancing heart.

As usual came the inevitable dies non, when the unfledged traveller makes a first bow to the Channel, followed by one or two squeamish days, when the Bay of Biscay as lauded in poesy and the Bay of Biscay as discovered in practice are two quite antagonistic things. After which, with rarified complexion, the sufferer forgets his troubles, and mounts the deck to enjoy a beatific spell of brine and breeze.

So in due course did Elsie. She found Mrs Willis, who was an old campaigner, busily engaged in conversation, or its equivalent, the note-comparing, gossip-scavengering tattle which is inherent to feminine camp followers of a certain age. Her companions were one Major Lane and his friend, Captain Burton Aylmer, the latter a person of some celebrity in military circles where sport was supreme. He looked lazy, long, and languid, and to those who had seen him neither tent-pegging nor polo playing, who knew nothing of the spearing of veteran boars, whose tushes fringed his mantel at home, nor of the "man eater" duel, which in hunting annals had made his name historical, he seemed effete, if not affected. He was lolling at full length in a rattan chair, listening indolently to the flippant duologue of the major and the grass widow. The lady did not interest him. Her type was too cheap. She represented one of an order that seemed to be chromo-lithographed in reams for the benefit of garrisons in Great Britain, India, and the Colonies; but when he discovered in her the chaperone of a young ingenue, with fringeless forehead and skin like new milk dashed with sunset, his nonchalance subsided, and he became almost polite. Mrs Willis was prompt to detect the change of tactics, and swift to solve the problem. She plumed herself not a little on the possession of a decoy duck, capable of luring so desirable a prey as Captain Burton Aylmer into her social toils.

"Be civil to him, my dear," she advised when in private. "Half the women on board would give their eyes to get him in tow. He is very difficile." Mrs Willis affected the slangy in talking to young girls. She thought it gave a contemporaneous flavour to the intercourse.

"He seemed to me pleasant enough," breathed Elsie, who was quite unscienced in complexities of character.

"He can be when he chooses. They say Lady Staines would have given her back hair for him and followed him barefoot across Asia—but he didn't see it!"

"Oh!"

"He is very accustomed to that sort of thing. His heart is quite tear-toughened, a kind of spongiopiline—receptive and impermeable at the same time."

"Perhaps you do him an injustice; there may never have been a question of his heart?"

"His sponsor so soon? Beware, little girl; they say he never loved since a certain queen of society threw him over for strawberry leaves."

"Threw him over!" A line of Tennyson regarding the value of coronets flashed across her. She wondered with a girlish contemplative scepticism how this bronzed physique, this heroic modelling, this almost womanly gentleness of expression had failed, having won, to hold.

Hour after hour passed in the usual shipboard routine, by which every day became the exact counterpart of its forerunner. Only to Elsie was each moment a joy and a revelation. It was impossible to disregard the fact that, from being a juvenile of no account, she had developed into a personage—a personage, whose humble servitor society had been ready enough to serve. In the conquest there was no elation such as might have existed for maturer women. She was too absorbed with the all ruling presence to heed what happened around. The wind was only fresh when it carried his voice to her ear, the waves only buoyant when they danced beneath their mutual pacings; day was light, because she shared it with him; night was dark, because they were apart.

At last Mrs Willis betrayed signs of alarm. "A mild flirtation is all very well, but people will talk; you must really be careful, Elsie! What will Victor Dorrien say when he comes to claim his bride?"

Dorrien! His bride! The words mentally thrust Bradshaw into the binding of Keats; she suffocated as though she had steamed direct from Eden to seaside lodgings. Was she indeed affianced to this almost unremembered lover of her childhood, and was she indeed journeying straight into his arms? How came it that the purpose of her voyage had been almost forgotten, that the seconds had grown so full of actuality as to outsize the horizon, the zenithed sunshine so blinding, that all surroundings seemed enveloped in atmospheric haze?

Each morning in her cabin she registered a vow that the coming day should be the last of illusion, that the stern facts of destiny should be faced; each night her fevered, impatient brain cried for dawn, to prove by the sight of the noble outlines, the sound of the beloved voice, that the end was not yet come. It was scarcely his utterances that attracted; perhaps the knowledge of his soul grew best from what he failed to say, what he failed to seem. But she saw the weary boredom of his eyes change to fire as her glance sought his, and she knew her lightest speech sped like spores upon the wind to find a root and resting place within his heart. She yearned to hint at her projected fate—she yearned, yet dreaded. Dissection of the sentimental mosaic of years is no facile undertaking, so many scraps and fragments go to the gradual making of the romantic whole, and she dared not approach the culminating tangle of the love story without explaining in detail the nascence and growth of the dilemma.

Thus with the course of the vessel drifted the craft of emotion, past Suez, through the broil of the Red Sea, out again into a sapphire ocean.

Mrs Willis, looking ahead, saw breakers and imminent wreck.

"You are both mad," she thundered at Elsie. "This must cease; you must tell him that in a few days, immediately on your arrival in Bombay in fact, you are to marry."

"I cannot."

"But, child, think of it. What can you do? You must go to Dorrien's sister's house—it is all arranged—you will be married the next day. You know I do not land, and that there will be no one but the Dorriens to take care of you. You could not even return to England without delay that would be scandalous."

All this poured in a breath from the agitated chaperone, who had awakened too late to a sense of her responsibilities.

"I will tell him to-morrow—to-morrow night ... it will be the last," sobbed Elsie to the pillows in her restricted berth. And when dinner was ended, the final meal on board—for the vessel was steaming extra knots per hour in order to reach port at daybreak—these lovers met for their farewell. They paced the dimly-lighted deck in silence, with weighted feet, and hearts that scarcely pulsed lest the bumper of anguish might run over. Then, behind the wheel, where the gusts of laughter from the expectant and happy travellers could not reach them, they halted—still silent, staring with parched, despairing eyes at the swirling water and the long track of dimpled silver that spread like the trail of an ocean comet in their wake. The night showed serene and purple, a universe in regal repose, only the ship, throbbing with insensate activity, rushed panting to doom; on, on, on, while precious moments flashed fast—a shower of jewels falling into the abyss, never to be retrieved. There was no Joshua to hold time in a spell; nothing to stay the deepening hours from waning into a disastrous dawn.

She spoke. His profile cut dark against the ocean reflections; there was no fear of meeting his eyes.

"To-morrow morning we shall touch Bombay. I am going there to be married, Captain Aylmer." Silence again. The ship's machinery rotated evenly—mercilessly. His face was sunk in shadow, she could but guess that her speech was heard.

"Is it not news to you?"

Her words, like drunken footsteps on stony soil, reeled despite an affectation of steadiness.

"No; I was told you would marry unless——"

"Unless what?" she quavered.

"Unless you changed your mind—refused."

"Mr Dorrien's sister is my only friend in Bombay. If I refuse—leave her house—I shall be alone. I shall be helpless when Mrs Willis and you are gone."

A light hand, hot and feverish, shot its flame through his thin coat sleeve. He shivered.

"That is what I am coming to. Stand away from me—do not look at me—I want to say something which sticks very hard."

He shrank back into deeper shadow. There was horrible stillness. She stood transfixed, chilling, as Lot's wife must have stood when crystal after crystal replaced the warm and buoyant rivulets of being.

"Elsie—I may call you that just once—you must not refuse. If you do, you will be without any friendship but mine—and my friendship would be worse than deadliest enmity. The reason you must have guessed. It has kept me tongue-tied till now—a coward, a blackguard, some might say. The reason is because"—his voice blurred hoarsely through a strangled sob—"because I am married already."

A convulsive gasp from her—scarcely audible—no word.

He clutched at a rail and resumed almost grimly, cauterising his gaping wound with reality's searing iron,

"My wife is in a sanatorium, mentally deranged. A virtuous woman, but she was wedded to mysticism and morphia, and loved me never a bit."

The fall of pitiful tears, tears from the sweet blue of her guileless eyes, came hissing against the red-hot cicatrice. His strength almost failed. Such innocence, such loneliness needed protection. But his! This man who had brought down wild beasts in the open, found deadlier tussle in the confines of his brain. He quavered—his firm jaws clenched. Reason is muscular, but nature is subtle and crafty. With a jerk, a twist, reason is overthrown, but it takes time and heart's blood to stretch nature prone and panting.

When he next spoke his voice was hard—uneven.

"Elsie, for God's sake help me! Don't cry, or I must open my arms and hold you in them for ever, come what may. We have needed no words to translate love's language in—no signs to show we were each to each the complement that Heaven has made and laws of men have marred; we shall need no oath to bind us to remembrance. Good-bye. Some day, when you are older, you may know what it costs a fellow to protect a woman from her greatest enemy—himself."

The sound smote her heart, harsh and grating, like rusty steel. She could not scan the ashen mask that hid the rage of conflict; merciful darkness had enveloped the death struggle with a gossamer pall. There was not even a clasp of hands to tell his going; she knew it, but still stood there, as the vessel glided on into the sweltering night's maturity over a placid sea, under a placid sky, while human passions raged and rent themselves in useless agony.

Two hours later all was silent; most of the passengers, overcome with the tropical temperature and restlessness, were sinking into the fevered sleep that comes only when night's noon has turned a cool shoulder to the scorchings of the day. On the open deck, to catch what breeze there might be, the men slumbered, with forms inartistically outspread; the women, in a more sheltered nook, though not far removed, were stretched on couches all in a row like shrouded corpses awaiting the resurrection. Night looked down as on some pillaged city where only the dead are left to keep each other ghostly company. Suddenly, from among them there uprose a small, white wraith—lithe, barefooted, with wandering hair. It fled, looking nor right nor left—its footfall light as snowflakes—straight on, to where the ship's track threw a ruffled tongue across the stillness of the water. In a single flash the silver ripples gaped, parted, closed again, enfolding in the bosom of the deep the fair frail atom—an atom that seemed, in the immensity, scarce larger than the feather from a seagull's wing. Then the serene face of the ocean smiled smoothly as ever, hugging its hidden secret till the bursting of the grand chorus when the sea gives up its dead.

And Burton Aylmer, afar off, with outstretched, grey-flanneled limbs, lay motionless, his hands clasped beneath his head, his eyes staring with haggard scepticism at the floating ultramarine of the heavens. His lips moved as though framing a prayer, but he was only muttering to himself, parrot-wise, the burden of the ritual that bound him to "a virtuous woman, wedded to mysticism and morphia," who loved him "never a bit."