f colour. But I'm afraid it
would look crude and impossible in any frame except the frame of an
Indian sky."

She did not turn in speaking; but the softness of her voice soothed his
chafed spirit like a benediction, and robbed him for the moment of all
power to reply.

"I was really trying to stamp it all on my memory," she went on after a
pause. "It is a sight one doesn't see twice in a lifetime. Just for a
few seconds it was terrible. But I would not have missed it for the
world."

"Nor I. Now that I am here, I feel grateful to the Desmonds for
persuading me to come."

"Did they have to drag you here by main force?"

"Not quite! I thought I had better stay and grind at my book; that was
all. But they wouldn't hear of it."

"Do you always obey their orders implicitly?" There was veiled scorn
in her tone, and a new warmth in his as he replied:

"I would do any mortal thing they asked me to, within reason. In all
my life no two people have been so good to me."

"You evidently admire _her_ very much." The stress on the pronoun was
too delicate to catch his notice.

"I do, immensely. How could any man in his senses do otherwise? Or,
for that matter, any woman either? I hoped--I thought--you would have
been good friends with her."

He spoke his honest enthusiasm in the simple desire that she should
share it. But her nerves were still strung to concert pitch, and he
had struck the wrong note.

"You thought her many virtues might have an improving effect on me, I
suppose?"

The acorn was no longer veiled: and he winced under it.

"No: only is occurred to me that the two . . . . best women I have ever
known might reasonably have a good deal in common."

"It is kind of you to couple me with her. I am flattered, I assure
you!--But, personally, I prefer something lees exalted, something more
human, more fallible. . . ."

"Perhaps that explains your predilection for Garth?" he broke in
abruptly, pricked to resentment by her persistent note of mockery.

"I am not aware that my friendship with Major Garth requires any sort
of explanation."

She was rigid now--face, voice, figure: his golden opportunity gone
past recall. Men pay as dearly for sins of ignorance as for the baser
kinds of trespass: and the man who does not understand women is almost
worse, in their esteem, that the man who treats them ill.

"Is it wise--for your own sake . . . to be so careless of your good
name?" he persisted de