rd caught her
almost in a day. They met in India. Eustace and she were touring there
one winter. Everard was a senior subaltern in a Ghurka regiment--an
awfully taking chap evidently. They practically fell in love with one
another at sight. Poor old Eustace!" Scott paused, faintly smiling. "He
meant her to marry well if she married at all, and Basil was no more than
the son of a country parson without a penny to his name. However, the
thing was past remedy. I saw that when they came home, and Isabel told me
about it. I was at Oxford then. She came down alone for a night, and
begged me to try and talk Eustace over. It was the beginning of a barrier
between them even then. It has grown high since. Eustace is a difficult
man to move, you know. I did my level best with him, but I wasn't very
successful. In the end of course the inevitable happened. Isabel lost
patience and broke away. She was on her way out again before either of us
knew. Eustace--of course Eustace was furious." Scott paused again.

Dinah's silence denoted keen interest. Her expression was absorbed.

He went on, the touch of constraint again apparent in his manner. It was
evident that the narration stirred up deep feelings. "We three had always
hung together. The family tie meant a good deal to us for the simple
reason that we were practically the only Studleys left. My father had
died six years before, my mother at my birth. Eustace was the head of the
family, and he and Isabel had been all in all to each other. He felt her
going more than I can possibly tell you, and scarcely a week after the
news came he got his things together and went off in the yacht to South
America to get over it by himself. I stayed on at Oxford, but I made up
my mind to go out to her in the vacation. A few days after his going, I
had a cable to say they were married. A week after that, there came
another cable to say that Everard was dead."

"Oh!" Dinah drew a short, hard breath. "Poor Isabel!" she whispered.

"Yes." Scott's pale eyes were gazing straight ahead. "He was killed two
days after the marriage. They had gone up to the Hills, to a place he
knew of right in the wilds on the side of a mountain, and pitched camp
there. There were only themselves, a handful of Pathan coolies with
mules, and a _shikari_. The day after they got there, he took her up the
mountain to show her some of the beauties of the place, and they lunched
on a ledge about a couple of hundred feet above a