re her windows, and
looked with gloomy eyes into the sunny, laughing splendour of the
Eastern afternoon. At the side of the hotel was a luxuriant garden,
and the palms and sycamores growing there threw a light shade into
the sunny street just below her window; the sky overhead stretched
its eternal Eastern blue, and the pigeons wheeled joyfully in and
out the eaves in the clear sparkling air, or descended to the pools
in the garden to bathe, with incessant cooing. Up and down the
road passed the white bullocks with their laden carts, and the
gaily-dressed Turkish sweet-meat sellers went by crooning out songs
descriptive of their wares, pausing under the shade of the garden
to look up at the English Mem-Sahib in the balcony. She leant her
arms on the rail, and looked out on the gay scene with unseeing
eyes. "Beast!" she muttered at intervals, and her hard-lined face
crimsoned and paled by turns.

When her luncheon came in she returned to the room, took off her
hat and looked in the glass. The narrow, selfish, petty emotions of
twenty years were written all over her face in deep, hideous lines.
The mass of yellow hair, newly-dyed, looked glaringly youthful and
incongruous above it.

Burning with a sense of malevolent discontent and misery, she
turned from the glass and hurried through her luncheon, then
ordered it to be cleared away and writing materials to be brought
in, and set herself with grim feverishness to the concoction of a
long letter to the Commissioner. In it Hamilton's twenty years of
patient fidelity, through which time he had regularly transmitted
to her half his pay year by year were naturally not mentioned; her
own refusal to live with him, her incessant demands for more money,
her extravagance, her long, whining letters to him, her debts, her
own life in town were, of course, also suppressed. In the letter
she figured as the ardent, tender, anxious wife, arriving to find
her abandoned husband wasting his substance on a black mistress.
The visit to the cruel tyrant in his office was long dwelt on, and
the whole closed with a pathetic appeal to the Commissioner to use
his influence to restore her dearest boy to her arms. It was not a
bad letter from the artist's and the liar's standpoint, and she
read it through with a glow of satisfaction, sealed it up with a
baleful smile of triumph, and then sounded the gong.

"Take this at once to the Commissioner Sahib," she said, handing
the note to the servant,