ut of her skirt, after which Mrs. Mickie harked
back to what they had been talking about before.

'She's straight enough now, I suppose,' this lady said.

'She goes down. But she gives people a good deal of latitude for
speculation.'

'Who is this?' asked Madeline. 'I ask for information, to keep out of
her way. I find I am developing the most shocking curiosity. I must be
in a position to check it.'

The ladies exchanged hardly perceptible glances. Then Mrs. Gammidge
said, 'Mrs. Innes,' and looked as if, for the moment, at any rate, she
would withhold further judgment.

'But you mustn't avoid the poor lady,' put in Mrs. Mickie, 'simply
because of her past. It wouldn't be fair. Besides--'

'Her past?' Madeline made one little effort to look indifferent, and
then let the question leap up in her.

'My dear,' said Mrs. Gammidge, with brief impatience, 'he married her in
Cairo, and she was--dancing there. Case of chivalry, I believe, though
there are different versions. Awful row in the regiment--he had to take
a year's leave. Then he succeeded to the command, and the Twenty-third
were ordered out here. She came with him to Lucknow--and made slaves
of every one of them. They'll swear to you now that she was staying
at Shepheard's with an invalid mother when he met her. And now she's
accepted like everybody else; and that's all there is about it.'

'There's nothing in that,' said Madeline, determinedly, 'to prove that
she wasn't--respectable.'

'N--no. Of course not,' and again the eye of Mrs. Gammidge met that of
Mrs. Mickie.

'Though, you see love,' added the latter lady, 'it would have been
nicer for his people--they've never spoken to him since--if she had been
making her living otherwise in Cairo.'

'As a barmaid, for instance,' said Madeline, sarcastically.

'As a barmaid, for instance,' repeated Mrs. Gammidge, calmly.

'But Simla isn't related to him--Simla doesn't care!' Mrs. Mickie
exclaimed. 'Everybody will be as polite as possible when she turns
up. You'll see. You knew, didn't you, that she was coming out in the
Caledonia?'

'No,' said Madeline. She looked carefully where she was going to put her
coffee-cup, and then she glanced out again at the laburnum hanging over
the plains. 'I--I am glad to hear it. These separations you take so
lightly out here are miserable, tragic.'

The other ladies did not exchange glances this time. Miss Anderson's
change of tone was too marked for comment which she