esperation she
introduced Sir Langham to Peter.

"Your sister-in-law looks a bit tucked up," he remarked affably. "We'd
better take her to the Yacht Club and give her a peg--she seems to feel
the heat."

Jan cast one despairing, imploring glance at Peter, who rose to the
occasion nobly.

"You're quite right," he said. "This place is infernally stuffy. Come
on. They know where to send it. Good afternoon sir," and before she
realised what had happened Peter seized her by the arm and swept her out
of the shop and into the front seat of the car, stepped over her and
himself took the steering-wheel.

While Sir Langham's voice bayed forth a mixture of expostulation and
assignation at the Yacht Club later on.

"Now where shall we go?" asked Peter.

"Not the Yacht Club," Jan besought him. "He's coming there; he said so.
Isn't he dreadful? Did you mind very much being taken for my
brother-in-law? He has no idea who he really is, or I wouldn't have let
it pass ... but I felt I could never explain ... I'm so sorry...."

Her face was white enough now.

"It would have been absurd to explain, and it's I who should apologise
for the free-and-easy way I carried you off, but it was clearly a case
for strong measures, or he'd have insisted on coming with us. What an
awful little man! Did you have him all the voyage? No wonder you look
tired.... I hope he didn't sit at your table...."

Once out of doors, the delicious breeze from the sea that springs up
every evening in Bombay revived her. She forgot Sir Langham, for a few
minutes she even forgot Fay and her anxieties in sheer pleasure in the
prospect, as the car fell into its place in the crowded traffic of the
Queen's Road.

Jan never forgot that drive. He ran her out to Chowpatty, where the
road lies along the shore and the carriages of Mohammedan, Hindu and
Parsee gentlemen stand in serried rows while their picturesque occupants
"eat the air" in passive and contented Eastern fashion; then up to Ridge
Road on Malabar Hill, where he stopped that she might get out and walk
to the edge of the wooded cliff and look down at the sea and the great
city lying bathed in that clear golden light only to be found at sunset
in the East.

Peter enjoyed her evident appreciation of it all. She said very little,
but she looked fresh and rested again, and he was conscious of a quite
unusual pleasure in her mere presence as they stood together in the
green garden, got and kept by such infi