"Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; and the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun."—R.L.S.

The rain, which had set in with such quiet determination at sunset, fulfilled its promise of continuing through the night: and the pattering on the slates that had mingled with Quita's latest thoughts greeted her, with derisive iteration, when she opened her eyes next morning. But its power to thwart her was at an end. Now that daylight was come, nothing short of a landslip could withhold her from the thing she craved. The thought leaped in her brain before she was fully awake. "And after all, why should I wait till the afternoon," was her practical conclusion. "I'll go down at eleven."

With that she sprang out of bed, and slipping on a dull blue dressing-gown, hurried into the dining-room, where she and Michael always met for chota hazri.

Here she found him, in Japanese smoking suit and slippers, smiling contentedly over an item of his early post.

"What's pleasing you, mon cher?" she asked absently, depositing a light kiss on his hair. For a woman in love—and a man no less—is as royally indifferent to the joys and sorrows of all creation as childhood itself.

"A letter from my pretty Puritan. It is not for nothing that she has those straight brows, and that small resolute chin. She will not be thrust down any man's throat for all the hen-sparrows in Christendom!"

"Why—what does she say?" Quita asked, peering critically into the teapot, and wondering how it would feel to pour out Eldred's early tea!

"Listen then; and judge for yourself:

"'DEAR MR MAURICE,—-There seems to have been an unlucky misunderstanding between you and mother yesterday. But I hope this need not make any real difference in our friendship. Because I think we have always understood each other, haven't we? Of course if my parents prefer that we should not be about together quite so much, there is no help for it. But at least I would like you to know that I am still, as I always have been, your friend (if you wish it)

"'ELSIE MAYHEW.'"

"Tiens! How is that for your 'child of twenty'? It is the letter of a woman; and a woman with an exquisite sense of her own dignity into the bargain."

Quita smiled thoughtfully as she buttered her toast.

"I am wondering how she would have answered if you had asked her," was all she said. "I don't feel quite so certain as I did last night."

"Ni moi non plus. Which makes the situation just twice as interesting. For all the Button Quail's beak and claws, I fancy I shall see more of my Undine yet!"

With a chuckle of satisfaction, he fell to re-reading Elsie's note: and
Quita, immersed in her own affairs, promptly forgot them both.

An hour later she reappeared—her whole face and form radiating the light within; went straight to her easel, flung aside its draperies, and surveying her work of the previous day, found it very good. But there were certain lines and shadows that displeased her critical eye. She would study his face afresh this morning, with the twofold appreciation of heart and brain, and surprise him with the picture when it was nearer completion.

Just then the bearer, entering, handed her a note. She opened it eagerly—recognising Eldred's handwriting—and read, with a bewilderment bordering on despair, the stoical statement of facts set down by Lenox in the first bitterness of disappointment, ten hours ago. The shock staggered her like a blow between the eyes. Her lips parted and closed on a soundless exclamation. The abrupt change in her face was as if a light had been suddenly blown out.

"Mon Dieu, . . . cholera!" she murmured helplessly, putting one hand over her eyes as if to shut out the horror of it. "This is my punishment for ever having let him go."

Then, as if in hope of discovering some mitigation of her sentence, she re-read the short letter, lingering on the last paragraph, which alone contained some ray of comfort, some assurance of the strong love that was at once the cause and the anodyne of their mutual pain.

"And now, my dearest" (Lenox wrote), "what more can I say, except—be of good courage, and write to me often. The rest, and there's a good deal of it, can't be put upon paper. That's the curse of separation. Start a picture, and throw your heart into your work, as I must into mine. God knows when I shall see you again. But trust me, Quita, as soon as ever I can, and dare, to put an end to this intolerable state of things.—Till then, and always, your devoted husband,——E. L."

It was the first time he had signed himself thus: and the envelope was addressed 'Miss Maurice'! The irony of it cut her to the quick. Tears of self-pity, flooding her eyes, startled her back to reality; and sent her stumbling towards her own room. But before she could reach it, Michael's voice arrested her.

"Come on, Quita," he shouted good-humouredly. "Where are you off to?
I want my breakfast."

She turned upon him a face distorted with grief.

"Parbleu, chÉrie, qu'y-a-t'il a maintenant?" he demanded, with an odd mingling of irritation and concern.

"Cholera at Dera Ishmael—Eldred's gone down this morning. . . ." Then tears overwhelmed her, and he turned sharply away. "Oh go, . . . go, and have your breakfast, Michel; and let me be. I want nothing, nothing, but to be left alone."

And vanishing into her room, she bolted the door behind her.

Maurice frowned, and sighed. In all his knowledge of her, Quita had never so completely lost her self-control. It was quite upsetting: and he disliked being upset the first thing in the morning. It put him out of tune for the rest of the day. But after all . . one must eat. And he retraced his steps to the dining-room.

"I wish to heaven she had never discovered this uncomfortable husband of hers!" he reflected as he went "Since he will neither marry her, nor leave her alone; and it is we who have to suffer for his heroics!"

For all that, he found speedy consolation in the thought that at ten o'clock a new 'subject' was coming to sit to him:—a wrinkled hag, whom he had met on his way back from Jundraghat, bent half double under a towering load of grass, her neutral-tinted tunic and draped trousers relieved by the scarlet of betel-nut on her lips and gums, and by a goat's-hair necklet strung with raw lumps of amber and turquoise, interset with three plaques of beaten silver;—the only form of savings bank known to these simple children of the hills.

While hastily demolishing his breakfast, Maurice visualised his picture in every detail: and with the arrival of his model all thought of Quita and her woes was crowded out of his mind. Yet the man was not heartless, by any means. He was simply an artist of the extreme type, endowed by temperament with the capacity for subordinating all things,—his own griefs no less than the griefs of others,—to one dominant, insatiable purpose. And according to his lights he must be judged.

Quita remained invisible till lunch-time, lying inert, where she had flung herself, upon her unmade bed.

The first tempest of misery, and rebellion, and self-castigation had given place to sheer exhaustion. For even suffering has its limitations; which is perhaps the reason why grief rarely kills. All the springs of life seemed suddenly to have run down. Her spirit felt crushed and broken by the obstructiveness of all about her. The strain of the past three weeks, following upon a severe shock, had told upon her more than she knew; and this morning's sharp revulsion of feeling brought her near to purely physical collapse.

And while she lay alone through two endless hours, tracing designs from the cracks in the whitewashed wall, one conviction haunted her with morbid persistence. Because she had not valued him in the beginning, because she had repudiated him in a moment of wounded pride, he would be taken from her, now that heart and soul were set upon him, and she would never see him again. It was useless to argue that the idea was childish; a mere nightmare of overwrought nerves. It persisted and prevailed, till she felt herself crushed in the grip of a relentless, impersonal Force, against which neither penitence nor tears would avail.

Finally, worn out with pain and rebellion, she fell asleep.