ut."

"I know, I know," the doctor had said. "A bad business and cruelly hard
on her; but I wish we could get her strength up a bit somehow. I don't
like it--this lack of interest in everything--I don't like it." And the
doctor's thin, clever face looked lined and worried as he left.

His words rang in Jan's ears, drowning her own spoken words that seemed
such a hollow sham.

She went and knelt by Fay's long chair. Fay touched her cheek very
gently (little Fay had the same adorable tender gestures). "It would
make it easier for both of us if you'd face it, my dear," she said. "I
could talk much more sensibly then and make plans, and perhaps really be
of some use. But I feel a wretched hypocrite to talk of sharing in
things when I know perfectly well I shan't be there."

"Don't you want to be there?" Jan asked, hoarsely.

[Illustration: "It would make it easier for both of us if you'd face it,
my dear."]

Fay shook her head. "I know it's mean to shuffle out of it all, but I
_am_ so tired. Do you think it very horrid of me, Jan?"

In silence Jan held her close; and in that moment she faced it.

The days went on, strange, quiet days of brilliant sunshine. Their daily
life shrouded from the outside world even as the verandah was shrouded
from the sun when Lalkhan let down the chicks every day after tiffin.

Peter was their only visitor besides the doctor, and Peter came
practically every day. He generally took Jan out after tea, sometimes
with the children, sometimes alone. He even went with her to the bank in
Elphinstone Circle, so like a bit of Edinburgh, with its solid stone
houses, and found that Hugo actually had lodged fifty pounds there in
Fay's name. The clerks looked curiously at Jan, for they thought she was
Mrs. Tancred. Every one in business or official circles in Bombay knew
about Hugo Tancred. His conduct had, for a while, even ousted the usual
topics of conversation--money, food, and woman--from the bazaars; and an
exhaustive discussion of it was only kept out of the Native Press by the
combined efforts of the Police and his own Department. Jan gained from
Peter a fairly clear idea of the _debacle_ that had occurred in Hugo
Tancred's life. She no longer wondered that Fay refused to leave the
bungalow. She began to feel branded herself.

For Jan, Peter's visits had come to have something of the relief the
loosening of a too-tight bandage gives to a wounded man. He generally
came at tea-time when Fay