her directness was
demoralizing.

'It isn't a mortal disease.'

'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. 'Couldn't you do ANYthing?'

I looked at her, and she said at once, 'No, of course you couldn'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! Wh