ad; who answered indifferently to the name of William or Bill;
whose speech was heavy with the flowers of the vernacular; who could act
in amateur theatricals, play on the banjo, rule eight servants and
two horses, their accounts and their diseases, and look men slowly and
deliberately between the eyes--even after they had proposed to her and
been rejected.

"I like men who do things," she had confided to a man in the Educational
Department, who was teaching the sons of cloth-merchants and dyers the
beauty of Wordsworth's "Excursion" in annotated cram-books; and when he
grew poetical, William explained that she "didn't understand poetry very
much; it made her head ache," and another broken heart took refuge at
the Club. But it was all William's fault. She delighted in hearing men
talk of their own work, and that is the most fatal way of bringing a man
to your feet.

Scott had known her for some three years, meeting her, as a rule, under
canvass, when his camp and her brother's joined for a day on the edge
of the Indian Desert. He had danced with her several times at the big
Christmas gatherings, when as many as five hundred white people came in
to the station; and had always a great respect for her housekeeping and
her dinners.

She looked more like a boy than ever when, the meal ended, she sat,
rolling cigarettes, her low forehead puckered beneath the dark curls as
she twiddled the papers and stuck out her rounded chin when the tobacco
stayed in place, or, with a gesture as true as a school-boy's throwing a
stone, tossed the finished article across the room to Martyn, who
caught it with one hand, and continued his talk with Scott. It was all
"shop,"--canals and the policing of canals; the sins of villagers who
stole more water than they had paid for, and the grosser sin of native
constables who connived at the thefts; of the transplanting bodily of
villages to newly irrigated ground, and of the coming fight with the
desert in the south when the Provincial funds should warrant the opening
of the long-surveyed Luni Protective Canal System. And Scott spoke
openly of his great desire to be put on one particular section of the
work where he knew the land and the people; and Martyn sighed for a
billet in the Himalayan foot-hills, and said his mind of his superiors,
and William rolled cigarettes and said nothing, but smiled gravely on
her brother because he was happy.

At ten Scott's horse came to the door, and the evenin