ed or coerced
him. With the best of intentions she had bored him to extinction. His
interest in things became slender; he drank himself to death, and not
even the ghost of his self lived to grieve by his bedside.

In spite of everything it had not been a bad life in its way. Victoria
had been the belle, in spite of Mrs Major Dartle and her peroxidised
tresses. And there had been polo (Dicky always would have three ponies
and refused three hundred guineas for Tagrag), and regimental dances and
gymkhanas and what not. Under the sleepy sun these three years had
passed, not like a flash of lightning, but slowly, dreamily, in the
unending routine of marches, inspections, migrations to and from the
hills. The end had come quickly. One day they carried Dick Fulton all
the way from the mess and laid him under his own verandah. The fourth
day he died of cirrhosis of the liver. Even Mrs Major Dartle who
formally called and lit up the darkened room with the meretricious glow
of her curls hinted that it was a happy release. The station in general
had no doubt as to the person for whom release had come.

As Victoria lay in the coffin-like berth she vainly tried to analyse her
feeling for Fulton. The three years had drawn over her past something
like a veil behind which she could see the dim shapes of her impressions
dancing like ghostly marionettes. She knew that she had loved him with
the discreet passion of an Englishwoman. He had burst in upon her
ravished soul like the materialised dream of a schoolgirl; he had been
adorably careless, adorably rakish. For a whole year all his foibles had
been charms in so far as they made the god more human, nearer to her.
Then, one night, he had returned home so drunk as to fall prostrate on
the tiles of the verandah and sleep there until next morning. She had
not dared to call the ayah or the butler and, as she could not rouse or
lift him, she had left him lying there under some rugs and mosquito
netting.

During the rest of that revolutionary night she had not slept, nor had
she found the relief of tears that is given most women. Hot waves of
indignation flowed over her. She wanted to get up, to stamp with rage,
to kick the disgraceful thing on the tiles. She held herself down,
however, or perhaps the tradition of the English counties whispered to
her that anything was preferable to scandal, that crises must be
noiseless. When dawn came and she at last managed to arouse Fulton by
flooding