ooked paler than usual, and there were blue shadows under her eyes;
but she answered his greeting cheerfully enough, and busied herself
with pouring out his tea.

"Ladybird is changing into a morning gown," he explained. "She never
went to bed last night poor child!"

"Oh, I wish I had known that! I did my best to comfort her."

"So she told me: and you succeeded. You generally do."

He glanced at her thoughtfully, a shade of anxiety in his eyes.
"You're not looking as fit yourself as you did a fortnight ago," he
said.

"Don't talk nonsense," she answered with a touch of impatience.

"Well, I hope it may be nonsense. But I feel responsible for you. Take
good care of yourself, please, while I am away; and--take care of my
Ladybird as well.... Hullo, there's Paul!"

Wyndham entered as he spoke, wearing the undress uniform of station
life: and Honor had seldom been so glad to see him as at that moment.

The two men stood facing one another for quite a long time. Then they
smiled, and sat down to breakfast. Both knew that in that long look
they had said all that need ever be said between them and it sufficed.

Evelyn came in a few minutes later, pale and subdued, but not
uncheerful. Her real sorrow, and no less real determination to control
it, gave a rare touch of dignity to the grace and simplicity that were
hers by nature;--a fact which her husband was quick to perceive and
admire. Both men, by a natural instinct, were a trifle more attentive
to her than usual, without the least hint of intrusion upon the
privacy of her grief; and it is in just such acts of unobtrusive
chivalry that Englishmen, of the best type, stand unrivalled
throughout the world.

The meal over, Evelyn accompanied them into the verandah, and stood
smiling and waving her hand to them as they rode away, with a
composure born of a stunned sense of the unreality of it all. Theo was
just going down to the Lines, and he would be back to tiffin as a
matter of course. Nevertheless, half an hour later the rims of her
eyes were again reddened with weeping: and donning a sun-hat, she
hurried out to a point where she could watch the little force move
across the space of open country between the cantonment and the
bastioned fort that stands at the entrance to the hills.

By the time Evelyn reached her coign of vantage, the cavalcade was
already nearing the prescribed mile where the final parting would take
place, to the strains of "Auld Lang Syne"; a