the room, smiled on the pair. "I depend on you and Judy to be good to him while we are away," she said. She and Sir Peter were going on leave, at the end of the week, to Scotland, as usual, for the shooting.

Following her glance, I felt incapable of the proportion she assigned me. "I will see after his socks, with pleasure," I said; "I think, don't you, we may leave the rest to Judy?"

Her eyes remained upon the boy, and I saw the passion rise in them, at which I turned mine elsewhere. I have no children of my own, and it is a thing I cannot bear - that look.

"Poor old Judy!" she went on. "She never would be bothered with him in all his dear hobbledehoy time; she resented, his claims: the unreasonable creature used to limit me to three anecdotes a week; and now she has him on her hands, if you like. See the pretty air of deference in the way he listens to her. He has nice manners, the villain, if he is a Chichele.”

"Oh, you have improved Sir Peter's," I said kindly.

"I do hope Judy will think him worth. while. I can't quite expect that he will be up to her, bless him! She is so much cleverer, is n't she, than any of us? But if she will just be herself with him it will make such a difference."

The other two crossed the room to us at that, and Judy gaily made Somers over to his mother, trailing off to find Robert in the billiard-room.

"Well, what has Mrs. Harbottle been telling you?" Anna asked him.

The young man's eye followed Judy; his hand went musingly to his mustache.

"She was telling me," he said, "that people in India were sepulchres of themselves, but that now and then one came who could roll away another's stone."

"It sounds promising," said Lady Chichele to me.

"It sounds cryptic," I laughed to Somers, but I saw that he had the key.

I cannot say that I attended diligently to Mr. Chichele's socks, but the part corresponding was freely assigned me. After his people went I saw him often. He pretended to find qualities in my tea, implied that he found them in my talk. As a matter of fact, it was my inquiring attitude that he loved, the knowledge that there

was no detail that he could give me about himself, his impressions and experiences, that would not interest me. I would not for the world imply that he was egotistical or complacent; absolutely the reverse: but he possessed, the dear fellow, an articulate soul, which found its happiness in expression, and I liked to listen. I feel that these are complicated words to explain a very simple relation, and I pause to wonder what is left to me if I wished to describe his intercourse with Mrs. Harbottle. Luckily, there is an alternative: one need not do it. I wish I had somewhere on paper Judy's own account of it at this period, however. It is a thing she would have enjoyed writing, and more enjoyed communicating, at this period.

There was a grave reticence in his talk about her which amused me in the beginning. Mrs. Harbottle had been for ten years important enough to us all, but her serious significance, the light and the beauty in her, had plainly been reserved for the discovery of this sensitive and intelligent person not very long from Sandhurst and exactly twenty-six. I was barely allowed a familiar reference, and anything approaching a flippancy was met with penetrating silence. I was almost rebuked for lightly suggesting that she must occasionally find herself bored in Peshawar.

"I think not anywhere," said Mr. Chichele. "Mrs. Harbottle is one of the few people who sound the privilege of living."

This to me, who had counted Mrs. Harbottle's yawns on so many occasions! It became presently necessary to be careful, tactful, in one's implications about Mrs. Harbottle, and to recognize a certain distinction in the fact that one was the only person with whom Mr. Chichele discussed her at all.

The day came when we talked of Robert; it was bound to come in the progress of any intelligent and affectionate colloquy which had his wife for inspiration. I was familiar, of course, with Somers's opinion that the colonel was an awfully good sort; that had been among the preliminaries, and had become understood as the base of all references. And I liked Robert Harbottle very well myself. When his adjutant called him a born leader of men, however, I felt compelled to look at the statement consideringly.

"In a tight place," I said, - dear me,

what expressions had the freedom of our little frontier drawing-rooms! -"I would as soon depend on him as on anybody; but as for leadership-"

"He is such a good fellow that nobody here does justice to his soldierly qualities," said Somers, "except Mrs. Harbottle."

"Has she been telling you about them?" I inquired.

"Well," he hesitated, "she told me about the Mulla Nulla affair. She is rather proud of that. Any woman would be."

"I think her devotion to him splendid." Quite splendid. Have you seen the things he brought her from the Simla art exhibition? He said they were nice bits of color, and she hung them in the drawingroom, where she will have to look at them every day. Let us admire her- dear Judy."

"Oh," he said, with a fine air of detachment, "do you think they are so necessary, those agreements?"

"Well," I replied, "we see that they are not indispensable. More sugar? I have given you only one lump. And we know, at all events," I added unguardedly, "that she could have had no illusion about him."

The young man looked up quickly. "Is that story true?" he asked.

Then the Harbottles themselves joined us, very cheery after a gallop from the WazirBagh. We talked of old times, old friendships, good swords that were broken, names that had carried far, and Somers effaced himself in the perfect manner of the British subaltern. I noticed when the three rode away together that the colonel was beginning to sit down rather solidly on his big New Zealander; and I watched the dusk come over from the foot-hills for a long time, thinking more kindly than I had spoken of Robert Harbottle.

I have often wondered how far happiness is contributed to a temperament like Judy Harbottle's, and how far it creates its own; but I doubt whether, on either count, she found as much in any other winter of her life, except, perhaps, the remote ones by the Seine. Those ardent hours of hers when everything she said was touched with the flame of her individuality came oftener. She suddenly cleaned up her palette, and began to translate in one study after another the language of the frontier country, that spoke only in stones and in shadows under the stones and in sunlight over them. There is nothing in the Academy of this year, at all events, that I would exchange for the one she gave me. She lived her physical life at a pace which carried us all along with her; she hunted and drove and danced and dined with such sincere intention as convinced us all that in hunting and driving and dancing and dining there were satisfactions that had been somehow overlooked. The surgeonmajor's wife said it was delightful to meet Mrs. Harbottle, she seemed to enjoy everything so thoroughly. The surgeon-major looked at her critically and asked her if she were quite sure she had n't a night temperature. He was a Scotchman. One

The doctor."

"The surgeon-major," I said, “has an accurate memory and a sense of proportion. As I suppose you were bound to get it from somebody, I am glad you got it from him."

I was not prepared to go on, and saw with some relief that Somers was not, either. His silence, as he smoked, seemed to me deliberate; and I had, oddly enough, at this moment for the first time the impression that he was a man and not a boy.

away the last extra, charged her with renewing her youth.

"No, Bob," she said; " only imitating it." Ah, that question of her youth! It was so near her still, she told me once, she heard the beat of its flying, and the blood in her veins leaped to answer the false signal. That was afterward, when she told the truth. She was not so happy when she indulged herself otherwise, as when she asked one to remember that she was a middle-aged woman with middle-aged thoughts and satisfactions.

"I am now really happiest," she declared, when the commissioner takes me in to dinner, when the general commanding leads me to the dance."

She did her best to make it an honest conviction. I offered her a recent success not crowned by the Academy, and she put it down on the table. "By and by," she said; "at present I am reading Pascal and Bossuet." Well, she was reading Pascal and Bossuet. She grieved aloud that most of our activities in India were so indomitably youthful, owing to the accident that most of us were always so young. "There is no dignified distraction in this country," she complained, "for respectable ladies nearing forty." She seemed to like to make these declarations in the presence of Somers Chichele, who would look at her with a queer little smile, half-protesting, half-solicitous, and plainly uncomfortable. She gave herself so generously to her seniors that somebody said Mrs. Harbottle's girdle was hung with brass hats. It seems flippant to add that her complexion was as honest as the day, but the fact is that, the year before, Judy had felt compelled, like the rest of us, to repair just a little the ravages of the climate. If she had never done it, one would not have looked twice at the absurdity when she said of the powderpuff in the dressing-room, "I have raised that thing to the level of an immorality," and sailed in to the dance with an uncompromising expression and a face uncompromised. I have not spoken of her beauty; for one thing, it was not always there, and. there were people who would deny it altogether, or whose considered comment was, "I would n't call her plain." They, of course, were people in whom she declined to be interested, but even for those of us who could evoke some demonstration of her vivid self her face would not always light in correspondence. When it did, there was none that I liked better to look at; and I envied Somers Chichele his way to make it the pale, shining thing that would hold him lifted, in return, for hours together, with I know not what mystic power of a moon upon the tide. And he? Oh, he was dark and delicate. His common title to charm was the rather sweet seriousness that rested on his upper lip, and a certain winning gratification in his attention; but he had a subtler one in his eyes, which must be always seeking and smiling

over what they found-those eyes of perpetual inquiry for the exquisite which ask so little help to create it. A personality to button up in a uniform-good heavens!

As I begin to think of them together I remember how the maternal note appeared in her talk about him.

"His youth is pathetic," she told me, "but there is nothing that he does not understand."

"Don't apologize, Judy," I said. We were so brusque on the frontier. Besides, the matter still suffered a jocular presentment. Mrs. Harbottle and Mr. Chichele were still "great friends." We could still put them next each other at our dinnerparties without the feeling that it would be marked." There was still nothing unusual in the fact that when Mrs. Harbottle was there he might be taken for granted. We were broad-minded, also, on the frontier.

It grew more obvious, the maternal note. I began positively to dread it, almost as much, I imagine, as Somers did. She took her privileges all in Anna's name; she exercised her authority quite as Lady Chichele's proxy. She went to the very limit. "Anna Chichele," she said actually in his presence, "is a fortunate woman. She has all kinds of cleverness, and she has her tall son. I have only one little talent, and I have no tall son."

Now it was not in nature that she could have had a son as tall as Somers, nor was that desire in her eyes. All civilization implies a good deal of farce, but this was a poor refuge, a cheap device; I was glad when it fell away from her sincerity, when the day came on which she looked into my fire and said simply, "An attachment like ours has no terms."

"Can you live independently, satisfied with your interests and occupations?" she demanded at last. "Yes, I know you can. I can't. I must exist more than half in other people. It is what they think and feel that matters to me, just as much as what I think and feel. The best of life is in that communication."

"It has always been a passion with you, Judy," I replied. "I can imagine how much you must miss-"

"Whom?"

"Anna Chichele," I said softly.

She got up and walked about the foom, fixing here and there an intent regard upon things which she did not see. 'Oh, I do," she said at one point, with the effect of pulling herself together. She took another turn or two, and then, finding herself near the door, she went out. I felt as profoundly humiliated for her as if she had staggered. The next night was one of those that stand out vividly, for no reason that one can identify, in one's memory. We were dining with the Harbottles. Judy and I and Somers and an intelligent globe-trotter had drifted out into the veranda, where the scent of Japanese lilies hung heavy on the spring wind, to trouble the souls of any taken unawares. There was a brightness beyond the foot-hills, where the moon was coming, and I remember how one tall clump swayed out against it and seemed in passionate perfume to lay a burden on the breast. Judy moved away from it, and sat, clasping her knees, on the edge of the veranda. Somers, when his eyes were not upon her, looked always at the lily.

Even the spirit of the globe-trotter was stirred, and he said, “I think you AngloIndians live in a kind of little Paradise."

There was an instant's silence, and then Judy turned her face into the lamplight from the drawing-room. "With everything but the essentials," she said.

We stayed late; Mr. Chichele and we were the last to go. Judy walked with us along the moonlit drive to the gate, which is so unnecessary a luxury in India that the servants always leave it open. She swung the stiff halves together.

"Now," she said, "it is shut." "And I," said Somers Chichele, softly and quickly, "am on the other side."

Even over that depth she could flash him a smile. "It is the business of my life," she gave him in return, "to keep this gate

shut." I felt as if they had forgotten me. Somers mounted and rode off without a word; we were walking in a different direction. Looking back, I saw Judy leaning immovable on the gate, while Somers turned in his saddle, apparently to repeat the form of lifting his hat. And all about them stretched the stones of Kabul valley, vague and formless in the tide of the moonlight.

Next day a note from Mrs. Harbottle informed me that she had gone to Bombay for a fortnight. In a postscript she wrote, "I shall wait for the Chicheles there, and come back with them." I remember reflecting that if she could not induce herself to take a passage to England in the ship that brought them, it seemed the right thing to do.

She did come back with them. I met the party at the station. I knew Somers would meet them, and it seemed to me, so imminent did disaster loom, that some one else should be there, some one to offer a covering movement or a flank support wherever it might be most needed. And among all our smiling faces disaster did come, or the cold premonition of it. We were all perfect, but Somers's lip trembled. Deprived for a fortnight, he was eager for the draught, and he was only twenty-six. His lip trembled, and there under the flickering station lamps suddenly stood that of which there never could be again any denial for those of us who saw.

Did we make, I wonder, even a pretense of disguising the consternation that sprang up among us, like an armed thing, ready to kill any further suggestion of the truth? I don't know. Anna Chichele's unfinished sentence dropped as if some one had given her a blow upon the mouth. Coolies were piling the luggage into a hired carriage at the edge of the platform. She walked mechanically after them, and would have stepped in with it but for the sight of her own gleaming landau drawn up within a yard or two, and the general waiting. We all got home somehow, taking it with us, and I gave Lady Chichele forty-eight hours to come to me with her face all one question and her heart all one fear. She came in thirty-six.

"Oh, for heaven's sake-" "Well, not with certainty for more than a month."

She made a little spasmodic movement with her hands, then dropped them pitifully. "Could n't you do anything?"

I looked at her, and she said at once: "No; of course you could n't."

For a moment or two I took my share of the heavy sense of it, my trivial share, which yet was an experience sufficiently exciting. "I am afraid it will have to be faced," I said.

"What will happen?" Anna cried. “Oh, what will happen?"

"Why not the usual thing?" Lady Chichele looked up quickly, as if at a reminder. "The ambiguous attachment of the country," I went on, limping, but courageous, "half declared, half admitted, that leads vaguely nowhere and finally perishes as the man's life enriches itself—the thing we have seen so often."

"Whatever Judy is capable of, it won't be the usual thing. You know that."

I had to confess in silence that I did. "It flashed at me-the difference in her -in Bombay." She pressed her lips together, and then went on unsteadily: "In her eyes, her voice. She was mannered, extravagant, elaborate. With me! All the way up I wondered and worried. But I never thought-" She stopped; her voice simply shook itself into silence. I called a

servant.

"I am going to give you a good stiff peg," I said. I apologize for the "peg," but not for the whisky and soda. It is a beverage, on the frontier, of which the vulgarity is lost in the value. While it was coming I tried to talk of other things, but she would only nod absently in the pauses.

"Last night we dined with him,—it was guest night at the mess,—and she was there. I watched her, and she knew it. I don't know whether she tried-but, anyway, she failed. The covenant between them was written on her forehead whenever she looked at him, though that was seldom. She dared not look at him! And the little conversation that they had-you would have laughed-it was a comedy of stutters. The facile Mrs. Harbottle!"

"You do well to be angry, naturally," I said; "but it would be fatal to let yourself go, Anna,"

"Angry? Oh, I am sick. The misery of

it! The terror of it! If it were anybody but Judy! Can't you imagine the passion of a temperament like that in a woman who has all these years been feeding on herself? I tell you she will take him from my very arms. And he will go-to I dare not imagine what catastrophe! Who can prevent it—who can prevent it ?"

"There is you,” I said.

Lady Chichele laughed hysterically. "I think you ought to say 'There are you.' I-what can I do? Do you realize that it's Judy-my friend, my other self? Do you think we can drag all that out of it? Do you think a tie like that can be broken by an accident, by a misfortune? With it all I adore Judy Harbottle. I love her, as I have always loved her, and-it's damnable, but I don't know whether, whatever happened, I would n't go on loving her." Finish your peg," I said. She was sob

bing.

Where I blame myself most," she went on, "is for not seeing in him all that makes him mature to her-that makes her forget the absurd difference between them, and take him simply and sincerely, as I know she does, as the contemporary of her soul, if not of her body. I saw none of that. Could I, as his mother? Would he show it to me? I thought him just a charming boy, with nice instincts and well plucked; we were always proud of that, with his delicate physique. Just a boy! I have n't yet stopped thinking how different he tooks without his curls! And I thought she would be just kind and clever and gracious to him because he was my son." "There, of course," I said, "is the only chance."

'Where- what?'

"He is your son."

"Would you have me appeal to her? Do you know, I don't think I could."

"Dear me, no. Your case must present itself. It must spring upon her, and grow before her out of your silence and, if you can manage it, your confidence. There is a great deal, after all, remember, to hold her in that. I can't, somehow, imagine her failing you. Otherwise—"

Lady Chichele and I exchanged a glance of candid intelligence.

"Otherwise she would be capable of sacrificing everything-everything. Of gathering her life into an hour. I know. And, do you know, if the thing were less impossible,