"I will but say what mere friends say—
Or only a thought stronger.
I will hold your hand as long as all may—
Or—no very little longer."
—Browning.

"No, I don't like her, and I don't believe I ever shall. One cannot deny that she is beautiful, charming, complete; too complete for my taste. Cela me gÉne. I know no other way to express it."

Quita Maurice balanced herself on the railing of her matchbox verandah, and gazed critically at the corner where the last of Honor Desmond's jhampannis had not long since disappeared from view. Garth, the inevitable, stood close beside her, faultlessly equipped as always, even to the gold-tipped cigarette, and the violets that blossomed perennially in his coat. He grew them in pots expressly for the purpose; and his bearer set them in a wine-glass on his breakfast-table every morning.

Quita's verdict on her visitor moved him to a smile of half-cynical amusement. He enjoyed her occasional unabashed lapses into the eternal feminine.

"I'm with you there," he answered, heartily. "The worst fault a human being can commit is to be faultless. Poor Mrs Desmond! She will have to subsist without our admiration."

"No need to waste pity on her, mon ami. I am convinced that she gets far more admiration than is good for her as it is. She has only been married a little over two years, I believe, and it is safe to presume that her husband idolises her shadow. She is the sort of woman men put on a pedestal, and worship kneeling; and women mostly detest, because, in their secret hearts, they would like to be up there too! Personally I have no use for pedestals. I am content to be bon camarade! As for that sublime Desmond woman, I feel morally certain that she never commits an indiscretion, or has a knot in her shoe-lace, or loses her scissors!"

"Are you peculiarly lenient towards those three failings?"

"I am quite culpably lenient towards the whole tribe of human failings. They are the salt of life. I have never really understood that incessant harping on the mystery of pain and sin. The question, Why should they be allowed to exist? seems to me simply fatuous. No world worth living in could have been created without them. They are the backbone of all drama; and I love drama inordinately. They put the iron into men's souls, and the grit into their characters. Think what a nauseating crew of sentimentalists we should be,

'If all had love, as every nest hath eggs,
And every head of maize her feathery cap.'

I, for one, should beg to be excused from spending three-score years and ten on a planet full of sugar-plums and kisses!"

She left her perch on the railings, and stood erect, in an unconscious attitude of defiance; and Garth watched her speculatively through narrowed lids. He was wondering whether Mrs Desmond's remark that she had persuaded Captain Lenox to go shooting beyond Chumba, instead of deserting Dalhousie for the interior, might not be accountable for this unusual burst of eloquence.

"I had no notion that you went in for studying big questions of that kind," he remarked, with an amused air of interest.

"Studying them! But no! What call is there to study them? I have my ears and eyes, and my priceless intuitions. It is enough. An artist will learn more about life and character with the help of those three, than all the savants in creation could imbibe from a hecatomb of books. Michel—where are you? What has been keeping you so quiet since Mrs Desmond's departure?"

Michael, who promptly appeared on the threshold, held up a large drawing-block for his sister's inspection.

"VoilÀ donc! Que dis-tu? Is it not to the life?"

The picture was a rapid, delicate pastel study of Honor Desmond, presenting her, as Michael had said, "to the life." The broad brow, the short straight nose, the strength and tenderness of the mouth and chin, the smile that hovered like a light in her serious eyes; every detail was faultlessly rendered. But Quita's cry of surprise expressed annoyance rather than admiration.

"What possessed you to do that?" she asked, sharply. "It is a living likeness—yes. Better send it to her friend, Captain Lenox. He would give you a hundred and fifty rupees for it like a shot."

The instant the words were out she tingled with mortification at having spoken them in Garth's presence. But he assumed a critical interest in the picture, and Michael, in the first flush of achievement, had eyes and thoughts for nothing else.

"A hundred and fifty? Parbleu, non!" he answered, hotly. "It is a possession, a triumph. I do not part with it for money. All the while she talked to you, I never took my eyes from her face, and I struck while the iron was hot. Mon Dieu, mais die est superbe! C'est une dÉesse veritable! Rien non plus!"

In ecstatic moments Michael deserted English altogether for the natural language of the emotions; and Quita flashed a glance of amusement at Garth.

"The pedestal already, you see!"

But Michael, deaf or unheeding, continued his paean of praise.

"But the head alone is not enough. Il faut le tout ensemble. Ça sera magnifique. Now at last I have the centre figure for my great picture—Mater Triumphans. In a day or two I call on her. I ask her permission to immortalise her and myself in one achievement. No woman in her senses could refuse so flattering a request; and her lips, her eyes, betray that, goddess or not, she is before all things a woman."

"But, my good Michel," Quita interposed, with a deliberate lightness, "ride your enthusiasm on the curb, I beg of you. Isn't one goddess at a time enough to fill your expansive heart? I warn you that if you are going to disgrace me by ostentatiously falling in love with this Mrs Desmond, I shall give you up for good, and insist on a legal separation! Now, I am tired of idling, and it's high time I went back to my picture." She held out a hand to Garth. "À demain," she said, with a gracious smile of dismissal. "But not till tea-time, please. I have a certain amount of work to get through every day if you have not!"

Garth's reply was conveyed to a lingering pressure of her hand. He was a past master in this discreet method of expressing the inexpressible; and he had the satisfaction of seeing the colour deepen in her cheeks, as she released herself hastily, and passed on into the house.

During a long ride homeward, Garth found time for much interested speculation on the possible issue of events. The situation appeared sufficiently incomprehensible to afford scope for dramatic developments; and he shared to the full Quita's taste for drama, provided always that it did not deprive him of sleep, or render him personally uncomfortable. He shared also her magnanimous attitude towards human shortcomings; frankly acknowledging his own, and skilfully utilising those of other men—and women. But bad men are as often tripped up by the unquenchable spark of good in human nature as good men are by the equally unquenchable spark of evil; and James Garth was not altogether devoid of the little leaven that leavens the whole lump. There were even moments—and the present was one—when it asserted itself to the detriment of his cool-headed schemes. Generally speaking, a husband in the background in no way disturbed his accommodating code of morals. But scruples, hitherto unknown, seemed set like a hedge of defence about this girl, who was, in every respect, so very much a woman.

For all her love of dangerous ground, her airy scorn of conventions, she had a knack of compelling some measure of uprightness, even from so unpromising a subject as James Garth. Thus, bone-bred gossip though he was, his silence in respect of her astounding revelation was assured. Her words, "I trust you, as a gentleman," had quickened that good grain in him, which is the saving grace of us all. Also the knowledge itself hurt him more than he could have believed. It seriously upset his equanimity for no less than a week; not indeed to the extent of damaging his appetite, or his sleep, but enough to make her society a distraction more bitter than sweet; enough to drive him into dining at the Strawberry Bank Hotel, though the cuisine of that mixed establishment compared very unfavourably with his own.

Here he naturally met Lenox, and the meeting reawakened his consuming curiosity; awakened also those primitive savage instincts which no surface civilisation will ever annihilate while the world holds one woman and two men. And how should it be accounted theft to rob a man of that which, to all appearance, he neither possessed nor desired to recapture?

In twenty years of philandering he had never experienced so keen a desire for conquest; and if this inexplicable husband chose to leave his wife in an equivocal position, he must be prepared to accept the consequences, which are, in general, the last things that any average man is prepared to accept. Shrewdness and vanity alike convinced Garth that Quita's attitude on Dynkund, viewed in the light of her subsequent disclosure, counted for nothing; while the fact that for six months she had readily accepted his companionship counted for much. Her fine sense of honour had naturally compelled her to "head him off" dangerous ground. But he consoled himself with the reflection that a woman's sense of honour is rarely her strongest point. Pit her heart against it, and the outcome is merely a question of time. A conviction founded on his own complicated past!

In his esteem, then, nothing stood between him and his desire but a poor crop of scruples, readily trampled under foot; and by a fine stroke of irony Lenox himself completed the trampling process. He, who rarely took an active part in the random, unedifying talk congenial to after-dinner "pegs" and cigars, had one night been moved to administer advice to a rapturous subaltern, in the shape of a few trenchant cynicisms in respect of women and marriage, bidding him not be fool enough to run his misguided head into the noose; and the subaltern had collapsed like a pricked air-ball. But Garth, to his own surprise, retorted with no little warmth; and Lenox, turning in his chair, looked at him deliberately—a glint of steel in his eyes.

"I couldn't presume to cross swords with you, Major," he remarked, on a quiet note of contempt. "Your experience is as extensive as my own is limited; and you have the good luck to be popular. I have not. But that is simply a question of mÉtier. Yours is to flatter women, even behind their backs; whilst I am blockhead enough to speak the truth about them, even to their faces. And the last thing a normal woman wants from any man is—the truth."

From that moment Garth had hardened his heart. And now—a week later—as he rode down from the Crow's Nest, he chuckled to himself over the satisfactory way in which Lenox was playing into his hands by adopting an attitude that would plainly act as a foil to his own deferentially persistent courtship; a metaphorical walking round the walls of Jericho, that must end in capitulation, soon or late.

From his point of view, Quita's unique position of personal freedom, coupled with legal bondage, added a distinct flavour to the whole affair: and so well pleased was he with the aspect of things in general, that, before reaching Potrain, he headed his pony up another corkscrew path, that climbed to another doll's house bungalow. Here he spent a couple of hours, lounging in the drawing-room of one of the lesser lights in his firmament, flattering her by a delicately conveyed impression that he found her the only woman in the station worth talking to. And so, home to his own well-appointed house, where, two hours after an irreproachable dinner, he slept the sleep of the man whose conscience has been trained not to make inconvenient remarks.