re possible. I'm none too confident, you know,' he
added, with longer face.

'We go straight to Agra. Could you come to Agra?'

'Ideal!' he cried. 'The memory of Mumtaz! The garden of the Taj! I've
always wanted to love under the same moon as Shah Jehan. How thoughtful
of you!'

'You must spend a few days with us in Agra,' I continued. 'And as you
say, it is the very place to shrine your happiness, if it comes to pass
there.'

'Well, I am glad to have extracted a word of kindness from you at last,'
said Dacres, as the stewards came to lay the table. 'But I wish,' he
added regretfully, 'you could have thought of a test.'

Chapter 1.V.

Four days later we were in Agra. A time there was when the name would
have been the key of dreams to me; now it stood for John's headquarters.
I was rejoiced to think I would look again upon the Taj; and the
prospect of living with it was a real enchantment; but I pondered most
the kind of house that would be provided for the General Commanding the
District, how many the dining-room would seat, and whether it would
have a roof of thatch or of corrugated iron--I prayed against corrugated
iron. I confess these my preoccupations. I was forty, and at forty the
practical considerations of life hold their own even against domes of
marble, world-renowned, and set about with gardens where the bulbul
sings to the rose. I smiled across the years at the raptures of my first
vision of the place at twenty-one, just Cecily's age. Would I now sit
under Arjamand's cypresses till two o'clock in the morning to see the
wonder of her tomb at a particular angle of the moon? Would I climb one
of her tall white ministering minarets to see anything whatever? I very
greatly feared that I would not. Alas for the aging of sentiment, of
interest! Keep your touch with life and your seat in the saddle as
long as you will, the world is no new toy at forty. But Cecily was
twenty-one, Cecily who sat stolidly finishing her lunch while Dacres
Tottenham talked about Akbar and his philosophy. 'The sort of man,' he
said, 'that Carlyle might have smoked a pipe with.'

'But surely,' said Cecily reflectively, 'tobacco was not discovered in
England then. Akbar came to the throne in 1526.'

'Nor Carlyle either for that matter,' I hastened to observe.
'Nevertheless, I think Mr. Tottenham's proposition must stand.'

'Thanks, Mrs. Farnham,' said Dacres. 'But imagine Miss Farnham's
remembering Akbar's date! I'm sure you