The dawn broke upon a new world as far as Hodinuggur was concerned. Where the desert had stretched thirsty and dry, lay a shoreless sea. Where the streak of silver had split the round horizon into halves, the double line of the canal banks looked like twin paths leading to some world beyond the waste of waters. They steered straight out of sight on either side, almost unbroken save for the great gap where the sluice-gate had stood. There the stream still swept sideways to circle round the island of Hodinuggur, which bore, like an ark, its company of refugees from the surrounding levels; a little company which straightway, taking advantage of the coming sun, began to wring out its wet garments and spread them to dry, until a general air of washing-day reduced the tragedy of the past night to the commonplace. And after all, what had happened? An old woman or two had been drowned, the DiwÂn and his tower swept away. But the world held too many old women and more than enough of nobles. For the rest, it had not been the Flood of the Most High; and though Death came to all in the end, and the loneliness of it must be dreary, still it was somehow more terrifying to die in batches, wholesale.

So, clothed in their white, new-washed robes like the elect, they went down after a time in companies to see the extent of damage done to their belongings, and test how far it was possible to wade through the water towards the village homestead or two which rose above the flood. Canal-wards, of course, passage was barred, would be barred for days until the stream ceased flowing or a boat was brought. So the horseman whom they could see picking his way flounderingly along the northern bank might be the only survivor of the big world beyond, and they be none the wiser--for the time. It was Dan Fitzgerald who, after an enforced shelter at the half-way village, was wondering who could have taken the responsibility of anticipating the telegram he carried in his pocket by opening the sluice-gates, and so, in all probability saving the big Sunowlie embankment farther down. For the sluice had been opened; that was evident to his experience at once, since without the lead of the current to cut, the flood would have swept on to do its worst elsewhere. Well! whoever had done it, be he watchman or DiwÂn, deserved something at the hands of the Department, and be the past record a bad one or not, this act should have its reward--its just reward--if he could compass it.

Ten minutes after, he had driven the chattering servant from the room, and grief-stricken, yet convinced into a sort of calm acceptance of the inevitable, had lifted the poor lad's body tenderly to the bed. He scarcely even thought of a reason for the tragedy; perhaps there was none, for Dan in his rough and ready life had seen such a thing before; had known the useless search for some adequate cause. And was there not cause enough here for a sudden loss of balance? That race down from Paradise to Purgatory!--the intolerable journey--the horrible homecoming; and then the cursed bottle he had left. The remembrance sent his whole mind into useless regrets. If he had only ridden faster, if somehow he could have been there in time to prevent the loneliness, the awful desolation of it all! for he had been through such loneliness himself, and knew what it had meant to him. Perhaps, taking his own excitability as a standard, he over-estimated the effect on George's nature. At any rate, as he stooped mechanically to pick up the revolver round which the boy's dead hand had still been closed, he felt that, given the necessity for sudden return, the rest might be inferred. And then, beside the revolver he saw the open locket, with Gwen's smiling face staring up at him. Gwen! Great God! what did it mean? His own locket, of course, and yet----he sat down at the table white as death, looking first at the pretty face, then at the still figure on the bed, now decently shrouded from the glaring light of day. And by degrees the colour returned to his cheek. No! it could not be so. She was not cruel, only careless; and ah! what a grief this would be to her! Besides, George was not one to put a life-long regret of that sort into a friend's life. So pondering, he realised that among other incidents of the home-coming had been that of learning who his sweetheart really was. That, then, did not happen at Simla, so that could not have been the cause of the lad's sudden return.

Why, then, had he come? The new lock and keys lying on the table, gave him a clew, and his quick wits suggested danger to the gates. Then it came to him in a flash confusedly, almost irrationally, that it had been done for his sake and hers, and he was on his knees by the bed in a minute.

'Oh! George! George! why did you do it?'

So with the answering silence came a decision, impulsive, yet immutable. Such blame as could be taken he would take. No one should know or dream of failure. No one should ever say--'Ah, poor fellow, he shot himself; must have been something wrong, you know.' Rapidly he counted the costs, the possibility of silence. Hodinuggur, separated from him by an impassable stream, could not be taken into account, so he must accept the risk there. It would not be much, if the servants' tale was true, that they had only discovered their master's death when the storm began, and had done no more than send word to the palace. No one, then, could have seen the body save those four or five servants, who loved their master, and worshipped rupees, and, above all, desired peace and quiet, and not the dangerous rakings up of the past which always followed on the advent of the police. Then for the Department itself. What he had said in his ignorance was true. Whether George had opened the sluice when, as the servants said, he went out in the middle of the day, or whether the palace folk had done it, the Department, in either case, owed the opener a debt of gratitude. If the latter, the Moghuls would be glad to keep silence; if the former, even if they set up a claim for compensation for damage, they would have been due so much had he, Dan, arrived in time to carry out his orders; thus no injustice would be done.

So half an hour afterwards, one of the servants started along the path to the outer world with a telegram to headquarters, and that evening, when the flood had subsided a little, Dan chose out the driest spot he could find in the sandy compound, and read the Church service over his friend's body. No one, he told himself, should know the truth; except some day perhaps, Gwen, when she came there as his wife. Then he would tell her, the pity, the needlessness of it all; and yet the needlessness had this virtue in it, that it made concealment possible; for the flood had swept away the error, if error there had been.

The telegram reached Colonel Tweedie next morning, among many more telling of disaster and death along the line of the great canal. Yet none was more pitiful than this one which ran thus--

'Opening of sluice-gate, as ordered, saved Sunowlie embankment, but palace injured. George Keene died yesterday of cholera. Very prevalent here. Details by post.'

'Dear! dear!' fussed the Colonel. 'How very sad! What a blow to poor Mrs. Boynton. She is so tenderhearted, and really, she was almost unnecessarily interested in that boy.'

They all thought of her; even Lewis Gordon, as yielding to that odd desire to see for oneself which besets us all when bad news comes by telegram, he sat looking at the flimsy message of evil; yet his first words were of Rose.

'Your daughter will feel it also, sir; feel it very much, I'm afraid.' Then he paused, to resume in more ordinary tones. 'I had, I think, better start at once, sir. I can report all along the line, and wire if your presence seems necessary. I hardly think it will be, and it is useless inconveniencing yourself for nothing.'

Colonel Tweedie bridled. 'I am not accustomed to consider my own convenience as against the public service'--he was beginning pompously, when Lewis cut him short.

'I'm afraid I wasn't thinking so much of you, sir, as of Miss Tweedie. This will be a great blow to her.' He thought so honestly, and as he jolted down the hill in a tonga half an hour afterwards he told himself he was glad to have escaped the necessity for seeing her grief, even while he was conscious of a curiosity to know how she would take the news. There was no such difficulty in imagining Gwen's behaviour. He could almost see the pretty pathetic face keeping back its tears, and hear the soft voice saying with a little thrill in it that George was the nicest, dearest boy she had ever met, and that she would never forget his kindness and goodness to her--never! never!

As he thought of this his expression was not pleasant, for Gwen had, in his opinion, done her level best to turn the lad's head, and so must surely know that she was talking bunkum. A man would know it; though perhaps it was not fair to judge a woman by a man's standard of truth, and Gwen, doubtless, was as genuine as she knew how to be; as genuine, anyhow, as Rose Tweedie, with her pretensions of utter indifference to all sentiment. Well, poor girl! she was face to face with realities now, for she had certainly cared a good deal for George, even to the extent of trying to keep him from Gwen's wiles. Poor George! a fine young fellow, who, for one thing, had been saved a bad heartache.

He had intended passing on as quickly as possible to Hodinuggur, but being delayed by the necessity for settling endless requisitions for repairs, had barely reached Rajpore ere Dan Fitzgerald returned, reporting that there was no reason for him to go out. Permanent repair was impossible till the rains should be over, as every lesser flood must run down the channel cut out for it by this deluge, and everything to ensure the further safety of the palace had been done. Barring the DiwÂn's tower, there had not after all been much damage, as the jewels and treasure in the vaults below had been saved: besides, the bumper crops which would follow on the inundations would more than compensate for any loss. There was, however, a certain anxiety in Dan's face as he said this.

'Well, even if they were to claim,' replied Lewis complacently, 'the saving of the Sunowlie bank would be dirt cheap at a few thousands. It cost us over two lakhs, and I was in an awful funk about it, thinking we must be too late. I tried to intercept poor George with a wire, knowing he would take the order quicker as he was already on the way.

Dan's whole soul leaped towards the possibility. 'Then he got it after all. I was wondering----' he paused, angry at his own imprudence.

'Wondering what?' asked Lewis impatiently. 'I was going to say I missed him, and then I didn't see how you could possibly get there in time. By the way, when did you get my wire?'

'About an hour after you sent it off,' said Dan uneasily. He did not care for Lewis Gordon's sharp, practical eyes on these details.

'That is, say, ten o'clock on the morning of the 6th, I suppose. Good riding, indeed! And that reminds me. The report from the Rajah's people, which came through your office, says that the water first ran through the cut about middle day on the 6th. Manifestly impossible. You had hardly left Hodinuggur. It's a trifle, of course but you had better stamp on the inaccuracy, and show you are on the watch, or they will go on to cooking generally.'

'Yes----,' replied Dan slowly. This simple difficulty in concealing the discrepancy of time had escaped him before; but he was fully alive to it now. Most men in his place would have set the question aside, at all costs, for further consideration, and risked the possible consequences of the evasion. But Dan's mind was of finer temper; he could trust it to thrust home at any moment. This is the true test of power, and it is only the second thoughts of the commonplace which are better than their first. So he took advantage of the occasion calmly, knowing his man.

'But they are right. I did not open the gates. I believe George did, but even of that I am not sure. However, you shall judge for yourself. I don't ask for confidence, of course. I haven't the right; but I expect you will give it all the same.' Then boldly, plainly, yet with one reservation, he told the tale of what he knew and what he surmised. George had shot himself--of that there was no doubt. The sluice had been opened, in his opinion, by treachery, of which George, at Simla, had received some hint, and which he had arrived too late to prevent; though this also was mysterious, since the gates had not been opened till long after George's arrival. The guard at the sluice had been drowned or had disappeared, and the new DiwÂn, Khush-hÂl, professed pious ignorance. In fact, only this much was certain, that the Sunowlie embankment had been saved, that George had taken the responsibility on himself even to death, and that the flood had made it possible to keep his memory from stain. For the sake of his friends alone, was not this desirable? This hint, no more, he gave of the inner tragedy connected with the locket. Yet as those two men sat looking at each other across the office-table littered with papers, their thoughts, all unknown to each other, flew to the one woman; but the memory brought tears to Dan's dark eyes, and left Lewis's hard as the nether millstone in the conviction that Gwen was at least morally responsible for George Keene's death. It came to him as a certainty, and yet a contemptuous tolerance came with it. She had not meant, of course--women never did--to play fast and loose with the boy's head. Yet she had done so. He had spent too much money, he had been careless; honest, perhaps, though even that might not be so, no one could tell. Why then should they try to find out now, when it was all irrevocable, when no harm could come out of silence? And George had been a good sort; too good for such an end; besides, even for Gwen's sake silence was best. He felt very bitter against her, very sore; yet such things must not be said about his future wife as might be said if the truth were really known.

'I suppose it had better remain as it is,' he said at last, moodily. 'Cholera has served its turn in such a case before--one of the advantages of living in a land of sudden death. Poor George! I daresay there was treachery.

Dan, shading his eyes with his clasped hands, was silent a moment. 'If there was, he had no part in it. I wonder if you remember a conversation in the balcony at Hodinuggur about what a man would do in such a case. "No, you wouldn't, not unless you wanted to be thought guilty." Do you remember saying that, Gordon?'

Lewis nodded; it was not a pleasant memory.

'I can't tell you the whole. But I am convinced George shot himself to save me. He knew'--what, perhaps, you don't--that I was engaged to a woman----'

Gordon pulled some papers towards him impatiently, and took up a pen, as if to end the subject.

'I suppose it is always "cherchez la femme"; yet it does not seem to me an agreeable factor in existence.'

'Cherchez la femme!' echoed Dan. 'Why not? They are our mothers and sisters, our sweethearts and wives, after all. And have you ever thought, Gordon, what it must be like to look back over a lifetime, and see next to nothing that you would rather have left undone? Or, if you're pious, to take a sort of pride in pillorying yourself for a cross word or a tarradiddle? There isn't a man in a million with that record, but half the women one meets--ay! half the women one patronises--have it. Perhaps it is small blame to anything but fate; still they have it.'

'Or think they have--which has the same effect! You remind me of a countryman of yours, a doctor, I knew once. "The sex," he said, "can't do wrong, and when it does it's hysteria." However, let us leave that poor lad to rest in peace; in a way that is more worth than the happiness of any woman who ever was born. And, look here, make the tale of reports complete, send them to me, and I'll consign them, dates and all, to a pigeon-hole. That is the beauty of official mistakes; you can pigeon-hole them and no one is the wiser, unless, indeed, some personal motive crops up. But that is not likely. So far as I can see, it is to no one's interest to make a row--not even if there is a woman at the bottom of it all.'

There was a concentrated bitterness in his tone, due to no cynicism, but rather to an intensity of pain; for if Rose Tweedie belonged by birth to that strange latter-day feminine development which unconsciously sets passion aside both from mind and emotion, and will none of it spiritually or physically, Lewis belonged to that still larger class of men who have driven it from the mind: who say openly that it is despicable; but that the world cannot get on without it; who insist in a breath in its unworthiness and its necessity. Gwen, he said to himself after Dan had gone, was very woman, capable of ruining any man in a week if she chose, and then being sorrowfully surprised at the result. Still it would be unkind to wound her needlessly by telling her that result; the more so because she would certainly tell other people, and Rose Tweedie might break her heart over it. Even if the pigeon-holed mistake were found out, they might get up a fiction about the telegram having reached George after all. The compensation might have to be given; but even in that case he could see no need for raking up the mud, since the claim would be a just one.

Nevertheless a week after, when he and Dan were once more seated opposite each other at the office-table, he felt vaguely uncomfortable. For a schedule of the dead lad's debts lay between them ready for the Administrator-General, and that showed an item of six thousand rupees borrowed on George's note of hand, backed by some youngsters on the very day on which he had left Simla.

'It was a first holiday, you know,' said Dan regretfully. 'And Hodinuggur is such a hole. There were the races, you know, and--and----'

'Cherchez la femme,' quoted Lewis; 'I don't blame him, not a bit. But if there had been an inquiry, Fitzgerald?-----'

Dan shook his head and sighed fiercely. 'Yes! I know. For all that, he was straight--straight as a die! My only regret in keeping the thing dark is that some one has to go scot-free.'