sked lighting a cigarette.

Joyce had been in the hills on the few occasions when the Reverend John
Pugh had visited Muktiarbad from Hazrigunge and conducted Divine service
in the reading-room of the Club.

"Do you think I should?" she asked, anxious to do the correct thing.

"I was thinking that the Brights take too much upon themselves. Mrs.
Bright is only the wife of the Superintendent of Police after all, and
your husband is the Collector."

"But Mrs. Bright is a perfect dear."

"Still she should not encroach on your rights. The District Chaplain
usually stays with the Collector unless he has special friends in the
Station with whom he divides his time. But do just as you like. I
thought perhaps he would think you did not want him."

"I should like to have him very much," Joyce said eagerly. "My husband
will be here and it will be quite a pleasure to us both." So Joyce
promised to write her letter of invitation.

On the whole, she was never at her ease with Mrs. Fox, who had rarely a
good word for her neighbours and voiced strangely radical sentiments
concerning Life and its obligations. They were often startling,
particularly as she made no secret of the fact that she and her husband
never "got on." Between puffs of cigarette smoke she would scoff at the
laws of marriage and speak with much leniency of divorce. Her sympathies
were invariably with offenders, and Joyce thought her rather too fond of
the society of men. Meredith feared and disliked her. The fear was on
his wife's account, lest she should be contaminated. "I have no use for
a woman of her type," he would say. "She has made a mess of her own life
and is a poisonous influence to young women."

"But it seems she has a perfect brute of a husband, who leaves her to
herself while he runs up and down the line amusing himself with other
women."

"It's a lie," said Meredith sternly. "Fox is not a bad sort. Men rather
like him, and he is a jolly good Traffic Superintendent. The Railway
staff think a lot of him. I should not be surprised if he is fed up with
her selfishness and the way she carries on with his assistants. No
decent man tolerates that sort of thing."

"If you talked to her for an hour, you'd think she was the injured
party," said Joyce.

"Then I'd rather you never talked to her."

But that was ridiculous in a small station where everyone met everyone
else every day, Joyce explained.

So when Mrs. Barrington Fox called, full of gossi