There was no one else to sustain Elizabeth. Darrell needed comforting even more than herself. She had formed no intimacies with any of the ladies of the station. There were among them many kind and tender-hearted women, but a barrier had grown up between them and the stranger from America.

Gradually the truth was beginning to dawn upon Elizabeth, that she depended more upon Pelham than upon Darrell; that is to say, she had married the wrong man, and the full revelation of this terrible truth came to her within two months of the time that she was left childless. It was in the heat of summer, and Elizabeth was one of those two or three of the officers’ wives, who braved the terrors of the hot season away from the hills in order to be with their husbands.

One stifling August evening, about ten o’clock, as Elizabeth was walking in the small grounds around their bungalow, the moon shining upon the tops of the great cypress trees which skirted the grounds, Pelham came down the steps of the veranda at the back of the house and joined her. The night was hot, as only Indian nights can be, but Elizabeth in her filmy white gown looked cool. She was as graceful and charming as ever, for the touch of sorrow, the knowledge of disappointment, and the necessity of keeping ceaseless watch and ward upon her own heart had added a deeper interest to her beauty while robbing her of some of her girlish fairness. Pelham, who was in mufti, wore a suit of white linen, and the two white figures could be seen for half a mile. They had not met since morning, a long time for them to be apart, because Pelham, who had lived with Darrell after the manner of a brother before his marriage, had continued it ever since. As he came up, holding his straw hat in his hand, Elizabeth said to him:—

“Where have you been all day? We waited dinner for you until at last we could wait no longer, as I wanted my poor Jack to go to the club. It doesn’t do for him to stay in this house too much.”

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“I have been hard at work all day,” replied Pelham, in a tired voice. “I got a letter at noon to-day, offering me a staff appointment. It would be a very good thing, a great thing, and I have been studying it over and looking things up concerning it all the afternoon and evening. It would take me away from the regiment for a good many years, but still—“

Elizabeth’s face was quite plain to him in the white moonlight. She was already pale from the heat and from her months of suffering, but he saw a total change of expression, a look of terror, come into her eyes. It was unmistakable. Pelham himself had long known how things were with him, and it was chiefly from despair that he had seriously considered that day tearing himself from Elizabeth. He thought she would miss him as a woman misses a friend and brother, but something in her sad and lovely eyes suddenly revealed to him that it was not as a friend and brother she would miss him, but as the being dearest to her on earth; and Pelham, being then tempted of the devil, asked in a low voice:—

“Elizabeth, would it be painful to you if we parted?”

Elizabeth, staggered at the quick blow which had been dealt her, made full revelation of all she felt; she caught him by the arm and whispered: “And could you leave me? What would become of me? I think it would half kill me. First my child was taken, and now you—“

She paused, recalled to herself by the sound of her own words. She dropped Pelham’s arm as quickly as she had taken it and withdrew from him a step. They looked away from each other, alarmed and ashamed that they had drawn so near the brink of the gulf. But the winged word had been spoken; it was now gone, never to be recalled. Neither one of them could move or speak for a time. Pelham was a strong man and Elizabeth was a strong woman, and they loved not as weaklings love; their hearts were not to be conquered in an instant. They remained thus for what seemed to them an interminable time. It was really not five minutes. Then Pelham said quietly:—

“I shall remain with the regiment.”

And Elizabeth, without in the least knowing what she was saying, replied, “Thank God!”

Then, involuntarily and unable to bear longer the stress of the situation, they both turned back to the house. The scene had lasted all told five minutes; it was in full sight of many eyes if any had cared to look; but for both of them it had changed the face of creation itself. It had not, however, changed their natures, which were singularly delicate and high-minded; nor had it involved them in any dishonor.

As they entered the bungalow together, they met Darrell, who had noticed them walking through the shrubbery. Elizabeth went up to him, and placing her hand on his shoulder, a familiarity she had never used before in the presence of Pelham or any other human being, said: “I am so glad you have come back; I was beginning to feel so lonely without you. After this you must stay with me more than you have done, because I am never really happy away from you.”

This was one of the most stupendous lies ever uttered by a woman’s lips; but the recording angel had no occasion to shed a tear over it, as he inscribed it on the records of high heaven. A look of pleasure came into Darrell’s honest, sombre eyes. It was not often that love like this survived the honeymoon, and Elizabeth must indeed be deeply in love with him, if she used such language before Pelham. He put his arm around her slender waist, and spoke to Pelham instead of her.

“You miserable dog,” he said, “why don’t you get a wife like mine?”

Pelham, with a smile upon his dark, expressive, and somewhat homely face, answered quite naturally, “Because I can’t find a wife like yours.”

From that day, in spite of the fact that Elizabeth was a true wife of an honorable man, her whole life was irradiated by the joy of knowing that she was loved by Pelham and even that she loved him in return. It made them both careful in a thousand ways where heretofore they had been without thought. It made Elizabeth the sweetest as well as the most dutiful wife imaginable to Darrell. Her constant ministrations to him, her untiring efforts to please him, did more than he thought possible to soothe his grief over the dead child.

Elizabeth had always been kind and flattering to Darrell’s friends, not only out of respect for him, but from the pleasure which every woman takes in exercising the conscious power to please. But now she was if anything more attractive to them than ever, and Darrell enjoyed a delight most gratifying to his pride in finding himself the preferred admirer of a charming wife who was admired by every man who knew her. Elizabeth felt, without one word being spoken, that her conduct was approved by Pelham. She sometimes suspected what Pelham never did, that he, rather than she, deserved credit for the lofty purity of their relations, and doubted whether after all Pelham were not stronger in a sense of honor and rectitude even than herself, so great was his mastery over her. For, after all, the greatest power which one human being can exercise over another is the power of uplifting and making better; and such Elizabeth felt was Pelham’s influence over her, just as Pelham felt that Elizabeth was his guardian angel.

The Darrells and Pelham spent all together four years at Embira. Every year Elizabeth thought she would be able to return to America to see her father, if for only a few weeks, but every year the Darrell exchequer showed the impossibility of this. Their narrow means did not permit them to travel, or even to entertain except in the simplest manner, and Elizabeth only remained well dressed from the fact that she knew how to make her own gowns better than most Regent Street dressmakers. They often joked and laughed about their old relative Lady Pelham’s fortune, which was to come first to Darrell, and, failing a son and heir, to Pelham. Darrell dolefully related how Lady Pelham’s mother had lived to be ninety-six, and her father to be ninety-seven, and not one of her uncles or aunts had died under ninety years of age, while the lady herself was not more than fifty years of age and reckoned the most robust woman in England. They built castles in the air, of what they would do when they got the Pelham fortune, and Darrell tried to induce Pelham to agree to a division of the spoils in advance. It was a great joke; but one day, nearly nine years after Elizabeth’s marriage, death came to the three lives which stood between Darrell and Lady Pelham’s money, and Darrell came into the life estate of a fortune of forty thousand pounds.