to the dining-room, finally wandered out into the verandah,
where I found the children's old nurse Anne tidying away the
children's toys.

I said: "Nurse, where's everybody?"

Anne left the toys and lifted both hands to high heaven.

"Och! Miss Douglas dear, it wasn't for nothing I dreamt last night of
water-horses. The night before ma sister Maggie's man was killed by a
kick from a wicked grey horse (Angus M'Veecar was his name, and a fine
young lad he was) I dreamt I saw one. As big as three hills it was,
with an awful starin' white face, and a tail on it near as long as
from Portree to Sligachen. It give a great screech, and a wallop in
the face of me, and jumped into the loch, and by milkin'-time next
morning--a Thursday it was--ma sister Maggie came into the door
cryin', 'Och and och, ma poor man, and him so kind and so young,' and
fell on the floor as stiff as a board."

Anne comes from Skye, and often tells me about water-horses and
such-like odd denizens of that far island; and I find her soft
Highland speech, with its "ass" for "as" and "ch" for "j," very
diverting; but this time I wasn't amused.

"But nothing _has_ happened, Anne. What are you talking about? Where
is my brother?"

"Mercy on us all, how can I tell? The mistress and the young gentleman
has never come in, and the master says to me, 'Fetch me my flask,
Anne,' says he; and fetch it I did, and he drove away, an' I'm sure as
I'm sittin' here I didn't see the water-horse for nothing. What does a
flask mean but an accident? Och--och, and a nice laughin'-faced young
gentleman he was, too."

If life is going to contain many such half-hours I don't see how I am
to get through it with any credit. I left Anne--whom at that moment
I hated--to seek information from the servants, which she did with a
valiant disregard of her entire lack of knowledge of Hindustani, a
language she stubbornly refused to learn a word of. The last I saw of
her she had seized the _khansamah's_ young assistant and was shouting
at him, "Chokra--ye impident little black deevil, will you tell this
moment, has there been an accident?" Backwards and forwards I went in
the verandah, then down the steps to the road, straining my eyes to
see and my ears to hear something--what I did not know. From the
garden the scent of the roses and mignonette came to me in the soft
Indian darkness. I ventured a little bit along the road, too anxious
to remember, or, remembering, to care, that I h