ke practically to himself, as
if he had reasoned this out many times.

'Oh, no!' said Madeline.

'But separation can do a worse thing than that. It can REINTRODUCE
people, having deprived them of their mutual illusion under which they
married. If they lived together the illusion would go, I suppose, but
custom and comfort would step in to prevent a jar. There never would be
that awful revelation of indifference.'

He stopped sharply, and the hope went through Madeline's mind that her
face expressed no personal concern for him. There was a small red stain
in the brown of his cheek as he looked at her to find out, and he added,
'I've known--in Bombay--one or two bad cases of that. But, of course, it
is the wife who suffers most. Shall we canter on?'

'In a minute,' said Madeline, and he drew his rein again.

She could not let this be the last word; he must not imagine that she
had seen, through the simple crystal of his convictions, the personal
situation that gave them to him.

'Of course,' she said, thoughtfully, 'you know the Anglo-Indian world
and I don't. You must have observed this that you speak of it; it sounds
only too probable. And I confess it makes my little impression very
vulgar and superficial.' She turned her head and a candid smile to him.
'All the same, I fancy that the people who are capable of suffering much
that way are the exceptions. And--I don't care--I believe there is more
cheap sentiment in this place than the other kind. What do you think I
heard a woman say the other day at a tiffin-party? "No man has touched
my heart since I've been married," she proclaimed, "except my husband!"
AT A TIFFIN-party!'

She heard the relief in Innes's laugh and was satisfied.

'How does it happen,' he said, 'that women nowadays are critical of the
world so young?'

'I shall be thirty in September, and we no longer look at society
through a tambour-frame,' she said, hardily.

'And I shall be forty-three next month, but hitherto I have known it to
produce nothing like you,' he returned, and if there was ambiguity in
his phrase there was none in his face.

Miss Anderson made with her head her little smiling gesture--Simla
called it very American--which expressed that all chivalrous speech was
to be taken for granted and meant nothing whatever; and as they turned
into the Ladies' Mile gave her horse his head, and herself a chance
for meditation. She thought of the matter again that evening before
her li