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 Then, as she wriggled her annoyance, the laughter in the heart of him
materialized.

"My dear, I am incapable, at the moment, of taking anything seriously

except the fact that you have come back to me. Which is a matter rather for
rejoicing than for imprecations. If I seem to pass off this occurrence as
unimportant, it is only because it is so over-shadowed by the importance of
the realization that I exist again for you."

"I have never imagined you existed for anyone else," she protested
indignantly. "Another time you'll know that when it looks as if I were
thinking of someone else it's really that I am concentrating extra hard on
something connected with your happiness."

"I'll remember," Cyprian promised, slightly catching his breath.

* * * * * *

They had dismissed Digby Maur and his picture too airily. His suffering
was intense enough to cause his hatred of Cyprian to reflect again on Ferlie.

Everybody in the Club could see that he and Mrs. Clifford no longer
held sweet converse together nor walked in that House of Rimmon as
friends. Its numerous unmystical members openly rejoiced that Sterne had,
at last, put his foot down.

The iron entered into Digby Maur's soul. His was not the nature to forgo
visions of public revenge. Ferlie was involved in them because, although he
had unjustifiably presumed upon her frank comradeship to the extent of
insulting her, his desire, outweighing the elements of purer passion which
she had primarily awakened in him, was an emotion more likely to breed
wounded resentment than humble submission, on the well-deserved
withdrawal of its star.

Ferlie, though secretly confessing herself blame-worthy, realized too

thoroughly by now that dynamite, in proximity with a match-box however
innocently decorated, is not a reliable combination, and, having once
capitulated to Cyprian's judgment, could be safely trusted to abide by it.
 Hence, even an armed truce was out of the question. She welcomed
with relief the news that Digby had taken casual leave and gone to
Rangoon.

"It shows he has accepted the position and means to be sensible," she
told Cyprian. "When he returns we can meet as club-acquaintances and it
will be forgotten that we ever appeared to be anything more."

"Burma does not forget," he said cloudily, and she understood that he
had learnt that lesson bitterly enough.

She might have been less sanguine of a happy ending to her own affair
if she had connected with Maur's departure a detailed announcement in the
Rangoon papers of a forthcoming Art Exhibition, on a large scale, and for
which contributions were invited in the form of original sketches, paintings,
leather-work, pottery and all the usual articles universally acknowledged,
on such occasions, a joy for ever.

Shrewdly positive that he possessed a work of Art worth exhibiting, and

a golden opportunity of advertising his hitherto unexploited talent, Digby
Maur had well-timed his leave. All individuals occupying the local seats of
the Mighty would be present; besides, at this height of the Season, many
outside visitors.

There must follow comment and inquiries as to the identity of the artist
who had produced "Imprisoned Flames."

He was right. There were visitors, and, among them, a millionaire on a

private steam-yacht and his personal physician; a young man with an
inquisitive expression, reddish hair and a loud happy voice which he
dogmatically raised upon matters which the Elderly and Unenterprising had
long elected to approach with caution.

In due course the new-comers found themselves conducted by the

residents, to the Art Show, where the chief item was already admitted to be
a unique painting which most people only remembered as the Girl and the
Gul Mohurs, though the artist had baptized it more erotically.
 Said Peter to his neighbour, after a cursory glance, "Why, that's my
sister!"

Several people turned, and, amongst them, a hovering Anglo-Burman,

referred to in hushed tones as the artist.

Colonel Maddock put up his eye-glass with an astounded, "Bless my

soul! It is Ferlie. Where on earth did the little minx have it done?"

"It's damned good," said Peter. "Probably it is Cyprian's. I'd like to have
a copy. When we run them to earth we will ask them why they never told us
it was here."

The Colonel and Peter never discussed the fugitives.

Aunt B., mistrusting the frailty of human flesh, had not mentioned the
relationship under which they were masquerading. They might have already
dropped it in anticipation of the divorce to which in common sense they
must finally succumb. Better, she thought, to let Ferlie tell her own tale to
Peter. She had not foreseen that Ferlie would delay too long in replying to
Peter's letter, on the basis that least said on paper soonest mended.

So Peter and the Colonel only knew that the two were together and that
Ferlie's name was Mrs. Clifford to stave off the world's curiosity.

Digby Maur was already lionized, and, being Digby Maur, his head
already felt a little light.

He longed for Ferlie and Cyprian to hear of his triumph at first hand,
and appreciated, with a tinge of malice, that the daily papers would afford
Cyprian a resentful shock over the publicity bestowed upon the painting of
Ferlie.

He decided to find means of introducing himself to explain that the

picture was not for sale.

The opportunity occurred sooner than he expected, by way of a lady

who had once known the man reputed to be Digby Maur's father, and who
felt sorry for the quasi-European son, and glad of his success. She had met
the Colonel, and, aware of the respect in which the Banks held him, thought
to put the young artist in touch with a possible order for Burmese sketches.
Finding herself near Peter she manœuvred the two opposite one another and
was about to explain that Digby was the artist of "that red painting," when a
friend jostled against her in the crowd and engaged her in conversation.
Peter and Digby, barely introduced, were left face to face.

"I must say you have not even a family resemblance to your brother,"
hazarded Digby.

"Which is not surprising," and Peter eyed him with interest, "seeing that
I have no brother."

Maur recalled the Club conclusion of Cyprian's relationship to Ferlie.

"I should have said your half-brother, Mr. Sterne."

"Oh, you've met old Cyprian? No, he is not even my half-brother,

though people used to take him for an uncle. He is just an old family friend.
But if you have met him you may know my kiddie-sister. She is staying
with him in Burma at present."

A sudden unhealthy pallor left his companion's face putty-coloured.

"I didn't catch your name," Peter was saying when Digby recovered his
breath. "Mine's Carmichael. My sister is a Mrs. Clifford."

He slightly over-emphasized the unfamiliar title.

The eyes scrutinizing him narrowed.

"I have had the honour of painting Mrs. Clifford."

"By Jove! Then it was you——" Peter studied him afresh and stopped,
faintly uneasy. This man must know Ferlie quite well. What on earth had
made him suppose Cyprian his brother—or hers? Better not inquire, lest he
should put his foot on some unexplained situation. He drifted into
enthusiastic comment on the portrait and escaped to warn Colonel Maddock
of the artist's identity. He had been prepared for an equivocal attitude from
the narrow-minded, who might criticize Ferlie's staying with a friend of
Cyprian's calibre. Odd of Cyprian to rush her off like that to Burma. The
uncle part could be overdone. Aunt B. had said they were living in the wilds
and seeing no one, so it had appeared not to matter. He had assumed them
lost to both hemispheres till Ferlie should become stronger after her
troubles and able to make some satisfactory arrangement with Clifford.

She should have confided in her mother, or her only brother long ago.
Of course he saw that she could not be left to the care of a chap who, from
Aunt B.'s hints, was little better than a maniac on one point, however sane
he might be on all others. Like the Vane woman, he would probably end in
a Home, unless—and Peter eagerly recalled certain experiments he had
been requested to make in Ruth Levine's flat and on the efficacy of which
he was now awaiting her final verdict. He was so "keen" on insanity and if
his ideas consolidated into success there seemed no limit to his horizon.

His gaze into space grew abstracted and he dismissed Maur's inquiry
with a shrug. People always took for granted that old Cyprian was some
sort of a relation: this fellow had obviously noticed that Ferlie did not use
the prefix "Uncle," and had assumed the rest.

Rum chap, Cyprian. A queer friend for her to have stuck to all these
years. He really must hint to her, though, that she could not, in any country,
pay an indefinite visit to a man friend, however elderly, without asking for
the acidulated comments of catty women and coarse-minded men.

By the time he found the Colonel that gentleman had already been
presented to Maur; who had made hay to some purpose; having decided to
try another tack and assume Cyprian something different from a brother,
this time.

"Yes, I have had the great privilege of painting Mrs. Clifford, sir. Do
you happen to be acquainted with her husband?"

The Colonel was grateful for the lead. He thought Peter had suggested
that Ferlie was posing as a widow. Much better to have admitted separation,
since, at this distance, awkward questions could not be answered anyway.
 "I have met him and have no desire to meet him again. You can take it
from me, Mr. Maur, that she was altogether wise in insisting that they
should live their lives apart. As for your picture of her I should have much
pleasure..." etc., etc.

He certainly thought he must have done Ferlie a good turn if this man
should be a talker. The chances were now people would get to know the
husband was impossible. He blandly concentrated on the picture.

"This one is not for sale," Digby assured him. "But if I can persuade
Mrs. Clifford to sit again—and I think that will be possible—I should be
happy to execute you a fresh order, though I never reproduce. I wonder if a
bank of our red lilies and the hint of a gold pagoda-roof in the middle
distance, reflected in water—you have visited the lakes?"

Maddock eventually gave the order for another portrait, subject to

Ferlie's acquiescence.

"We shall be hoping to arrange a meeting soon. Must run up to

Mandalay first."

However, after an interview with Peter, they both came to the

conclusion that Ferlie should not have left her nearest friends so much in
the dark as to her tactics.

"Aunt B. declared that she was calling herself a widow," said Peter,
"hence the 'Mrs. Clifford.' It was easier to avoid publicity and the interest of
the folk who covet their neighbour's peace of mind. The 'brother' mistake is
fishy preceding his attitude to you. We must pick our way if we don't want
to get Ferlie's name handed round with the ice-cream at every official show
going. When we see her I shall put it to her straight."

Digby Maur's leave at an end, Government House had shaken him

warmly by the hand. He had gained for himself a reputation, and the power
to shatter one.
 CHAPTER XV

"Ferlie," said Cyprian, one morning, pushing back his chair from the
breakfast-table, "are you feeling all right?"

"Feeling all—what do you mean?"

"You're not, then?"

Her smile was uncertain.

"Don't be silly! Why should I be feeling wrong?"

"That's just what I have been asking myself for more than a week. The
Hot Weather is not nearly upon us yet."

"I'm quite well," she insisted listlessly.

"Then, what is the matter?"

"Nothing."

"Oh!"

"Cyprian, don't tease," and her unnerved vexation contained, he

imagined, a hint of alarm; "there is nothing the matter. Though I see you are
determined to believe that a lie."

"It is one," he replied, opening the newspaper.

She resorted to a stormy exit.

What else could she do when he was right? It seemed sometimes a great
deal too high, the price she was paying to preserve their flawless peace. At
least, it had been flawless until Digby Maur returned from Rangoon, but not
to fall easily into his niche as a casual acquaintance.
 She wondered, when she sat staring at him on the river-bank below the
garden with its wild, concealing foliage, why she had never before thought
of comparing his eyes to a snake's.

He painted on, grimly speechless, but when they travelled over her,
devoid of expression, coldly alive, she could have fled in panic. And she
had got to see the thing out or everyone would learn that Cyprian had
brought her here under false colours and that, somewhere in England, dwelt
her husband, complacently aware of their flight.

The scandal would force Cyprian to resign, to whom public criticism of

his private affairs, even in simple matters, was real torture. For him, through
her, to be obliged to retire on an inadequate pension in a tempest of slander
was unthinkable.

Why had she been such a fool as to shrink from confiding, by letter, in
Peter?

It had seemed immaterial whether she did so or not, considering that, in

Rangoon, one could safely assume nobody had heard of her existence, and
he and the Colonel were not contemplating a long stay anywhere.

Peter at present, she knew, made a remorselessly logical Catholic with

no time for visions unsanctioned by the Pope. Order and discipline
everywhere, if you please, for Peter, once as thoroughly lawless as he now
showed himself law-ridden. But Peter was an extremist in everything. He
had really little use for the non-fanatic who hesitates to sacrifice, at any
rate, his neighbour's Life and Limb, for his opinions. But, while he had
made his submission to Rome in calm, wholehearted conviction, which
might or might not, in another ten years, be followed by as calm and
wholehearted a recantation, annulled in its turn by a general clear-up of his
whole life and a death-bed repentance—"for, though it may be a darned
uncomfortable religion to live in, it's the only tidy one to die in," had ever,
like Charles Stuart, maintained Peter—Ferlie had crept through the gate as a
battered ship creeps gratefully into an unexpectedly discovered harbour,
anchorless, after the storm.
 She had found there warmth and healing and a kind of companionship
among the angels that only very sensitive worshippers of abstract holiness
know. The Unseen Hosts were to her lone spirit so really present at the altar
steps that she could no longer consider the most deserted church empty.
Doctrinally, she was unsound. Authority had recognized the bewildered
pulsing of a heart too bruised for searching examination, and admitted her
with far less circumspection than they accorded Peter of the minutely
inquiring habit of mind.

The Peters are well known later to deny; not so the Ferlies.

By reason of that very loyal complex in her was Ferlie passively

chained to the Force from which she had once drawn strength, since there
could be no severing of her fetters without a severance also from those who
had comforted her in affliction. How mean to accept the sweets and deny
the obligations incurred! To question only the rules which affected her
personal desires!

That Force had stood by her in her darkness: therefore she must stand
by it now that she walked in sunshine.

Yet, Cyprian was wondering whether she would outthrow superstition

when happiness set in, and she was sure that, if so, he would soon persuade
himself, for her sake, that, though divorce in itself might be an evil thing, in
their case it became a necessary good. Clifford could be trusted to make
things easy; he to whom all women were merely, Woman.

The doors would swing wide on very little pressure (... Et ne nos
inducas in tentationem).

Since, white-faced and petrified, she had undertaken to deceive

Cyprian, and steal by secret ways and unworthy evasions into Digby Maur's
garden, yielding him the triumph of another picture in return for his
promised silence, she had conversed with him only in monosyllables and,
since he earnestly desired to complete the commission which might set him
on the road to future recognition, he had borne her self-absorbed misery
without making any attempt to counteract it or effect a reconcilation. His
feelings towards her at that time were an irreconcilable mixture of angry
desire and aching remorse.

The picture completed, it was his intention to make a final effort to re-
arouse her forfeited pity. If she should throw up the sponge before he were
ready he determined to stick at nothing which should force her and that
canting Sterne to eat the dust of the same humiliation they had publicly
heaped upon him.

He was incapable of believing that they were not lovers in the term's
worst accepted sense. And what man has done man can do, and the woman
who takes one step in that direction will take another, he promised himself.

Ferlie, nervous of Cyprian's penetration in the matter, attacked Digby

one afternoon, when the work was about half finished.

"I don't think you quite understand," she said, "the strain this deception
is putting upon me. Cyprian is inventing reasons in his own mind for my
looking so ill. But I simply can't sleep."

"Tell him then."

"Do you really imagine that he would allow you to finish this, if I did?"

"In that case I should distinctly advise you not to tell him."

"Oh, you are a cad!" she burst out. "What man, worthy of the name,
would take advantage of a private confidence inadvertently yielded, to
further his own ends?"

"You forget," he said, "your Cyprian never, from the beginning, would
admit that I was worthy of the name. Do you happen to know the terms in
which he forbade me your company?"

"Whatever he said he was right."

"Why not, therefore, resign yourself to the worst where my actions are
under discussion?"
 "We had an agreement before T consented to this course," she reminded
him. "I suppose you will not forget it."

"I denied any intention of employing tactics which had already failed to
make you see my side." There was a sneer in his voice. "I have,
nevertheless, abided by the word of a—no, I'll spare you. You started this
conversation, not I."

She relapsed into hopeless silence.

"Do you think I have not suffered too?" he asked, more humanely.
"Once, you would have noticed that I am hardly looking as if my own
nights were undisturbed."

Then, as she answered nothing, "You had better ask Sterne where he
intends to bring up his son that no stigma shall attach to his name in future
as he seems persuaded it does to mine."

"You could save yours if you wished," she said, in tired tones. "It is
what we are that matters, not what other people think we are."

"You may not be the hypocrite you seem. But as for your reputed
brother ..."

"I think, if I were you, I'd leave it at that," Ferlie told him, so
significantly that he paused and passed the rest of the sentence off with an
unpleasant laugh.

"I don't understand exactly what you remind me of," was his next
opening. "Have you, in England, any legends referring to the spirits of
trees? We, in Burma, people our mountains and rivers and trees with 'nats,'
which are powerfully angelic or demoniac spirits, but the tree-nats are the
most popular, I think. I might have painted you as my conception of a Gul
Mohur Nat, but, then, you would have had to stand nude among the
shadows—hardly visible, but still nude, with the dull golden reflections of
the flowers upon your pale skin."

Ferlie looked back steadily into the hard brightness of his eyes.
 The attitude of purely English Club members might be, in part,
responsible for the character-development here of weak expansiveness into
bitter withdrawal, and natural animal passion to the impotent rage of
unnatural excesses which lent him a spurious sense of power.

The real power on this occasion lay in her own self-control, and she
knew it.

She spoke impersonally. "There is a story of the first Old Master to

paint from the nude. It is not a story that appeals to me, somehow. The
model and the artist regarded the occasion so sacred as to warrant their joint
attendance at Mass first. Myself, I feel that they should never have realized
the suggestion of lust, in anything so aloof as Art, enough to anticipate its
interference."

She astonished and disconcerted him where he had hoped to disconcert

her.

"You would, therefore, have raised no objection?" rather lamely.

"I should assuredly have refused—you. There is a form of Art, which

only artists of a higher evolution than you are fit to practise. My objection
would not have been founded on any idea that the human body must be
concealed to all for the sake of those who misread its allegorical beauty."

He unscrewed a fresh tube with savagely nervous fingers, and

descended to cheap reviling.

"Sterne, I gather, is one of the fortunately evolved specimens who do

not misread the allegory and are, hence, privileged without the artist's
excuse."

"Your thoughts just bore me," said Ferlie flatly. "I can see them passing
across your face and they are ugly enough to mar any work you attempt.
And, underneath all my angry disgust, I am sorry for you. If you came
across a wounded snake what would you do?"
 The palette crashed to the ground as he took a pace forward, clenching
his stained hands.

"Put it out of its pain," he said.

A faint shadow of that hypnotic power, which Peter had so long

suspected and, finally, developed in himself, supported her.

"If you are, as I believe you to be, a true artist under your skin," and she
kept very still, "you will practise the restraint which should enable you to
put your picture before your—passions. I have stood long enough for to-
day."

She turned swiftly and retreated through the trees; nor did he attempt to
call her back.

* * * * * *

Towards the end of the week Cyprian, who had left Ferlie at the Club
surrounded by a new batch of English papers, and ridden out, himself, to an
inspection connected with his work at some distance, returned late in the
afternoon, to find her missing.

"Your sister, Mr. Sterne? No. She only stayed at the Club about a
quarter of an hour."

Someone had seen her walking towards the river-path.

"Then I'll go home that way, skirting the hill," said Cyprian. "The
servant met me with a telegram for her, having been to the bungalow and
found her out."

He rode slowly off, flicking at the flies with his crop. Once on the
narrow path above the bank he let the horse pick its own way. The back
compounds of one or two bungalows, set far apart, straggled to the bushy
slope above the water, but the vicinity of the river was too feverish in the
evening to be popular, and it struck Cyprian as particularly unwise of Ferlie
to choose this spot for a walk, in her present languid state of health.
 He made up his mind to tackle her outright when they got home and
insist upon knowing what was worrying her. He had taken refuge in
patience, but she sometimes needed rousing by sharper methods.

There might have arrived a letter from Peter criticizing what Cyprian
felt to be none of that gentleman's business. As an only brother, and older
than Ferlie, it was possible that Peter's scruples had outweighed his
discretion. Cyprian, having overcome his own, was not prepared for re-
discussion of the situation with anybody. To have and to hold, whatever the
future brought to either of them. He would plough the furrow now to the
very end.

As he registered this resolve afresh, he heard voices ahead, but their

owners were hidden behind a natural crescent of thick undergrowth which
somebody had attempted, in the past, to train as a rude hedge. Above the
tumble of scattered bushes appeared the ragged outline of a garden, flanked
by two huge Gul Mohurs.

Cyprian recognized them as those which stood in Digby Maur's

compound, reflecting with satisfaction that the latter had remained largely
invisible since his return from leave.

The ruin of decaying vegetation on the dank path muffled the sound of
his horse's hoofs and he had passed within a few yards of the foliage
concealing the speakers when the identity of one was revealed to him.

"I told you yesterday that you make me pity you, in spite of myself,"
Ferlie was saying excitedly. "I am speaking cold sense when I repeat that it
will be impossible for me to hide much longer from Cyprian that I am not
spending my afternoons at the Club. I actually had to go there to-day to
avoid questions before he went out into the district."

"Well, it's no use," Digby Maur's huskily uneven tones replied. "You're
great on 'control' and all that, and the means you employ to get here do not
concern me. You will continue to come for as long as I need you, because
you can't help yourself; and I am not nearly finished with you yet."
 Cyprian, on this statement, became entirely primitive man, and did not
wait to consider the metamorphosis. He dismounted, crashed through the
interlacing branches, and found himself standing between Ferlie and the
individual who had made this astounding claim on her time.

The air was pregnant with the labouring emotions of a drama as old as
the world.

Digby Maur recovered first from the intrusion, for, aware that he now
had his back to the wall he was, also, reliant on the sharpness of his teeth.
Sterne was the kind of man to sell his soul in avoiding a scandal should
such a drastic price be required of him.

"Good evening," he said. "These are my grounds and you will be ready
to admit that even my humble home is my castle?"

For answer, the intruder stepped forward and slashed him across the
face with the riding-crop.

The insolently poised figure reeled backwards as Cyprian spoke to

Ferlie.

"The horse is here. I am going to put you up on it and lead it home. You
don't look fit to walk."

Without a word she went with him down the slope. She would have
refused his help in mounting only that he lifted her bodily and set her
sideways on the saddle, putting the reins between her nerveless fingers.

The dull thudding progress of the horse was out of time with her
quickening pulses.... Something in the life of Cyprian and herself was over,
and of the new phase which loomed ahead she was afraid.

Arrived at the house she motioned him away and slipped unaided to the
ground. He tossed the reins to a servant and followed her up the path to his
office. She sank into a chair and sat motionless resting her chin in her
palms, dimly aware that he had passed into his dressing-room. She heard
the splutter of a syphon, and immediately he returned to push a weak
mixture towards her. "Drink it up," he ordered in matter-of-fact tones. "And
then, just when you're ready, Ferlie, you can begin."

So he had not forgotten his promise. Cyprian never made the same
mistake twice. It took a long while for her to tell him, and during the whole
recital he refrained from interruption. When she ended he drew a deep
breath and stretched out a hand through the gathering dusk to lay it over
hers in the old protective way.

"I have this to say," he told her. "We are through with any childish
arguments concerning one another's rights. You have taken no irrevocable
vows to obey me—in fact, I believe the word has lately been deleted from
the orthodox marriage service, has it not?—but our united brains must be
clear upon the point that two cannot walk together unless they are agreed,
and, as it is impossible for two human souls of widely different impulses to
agree identically upon the treatment of every problem they may be called
upon to solve, it is necessary that in final decisions one should yield
precedence to the other. In visionary matters beyond my ken I am willing to
sit at your feet. Over practical matters and the verdicts that affect our
material welfare, I claim precedence, Ferlie. You gave it to me when you
gave yourself into my keeping at Black Towers. I am responsible for you;
not you for me. Are you satisfied for this to be so?"

It was not in her power to speak, but she bowed her weary puzzled head
over his hand and rested it there. He laid his free one upon her hair and
continued speaking, while he absently smoothed the ruffled "bob."

"Yes? Well, in the circumstances, you had no shadow of right to take the
law into your own hands and act deliberately against my wishes, just
because my trust in you was too complete for me to conceive the possibility
of such a thing. If that trust between us is to remain solid, our problems, in
the future, will have to be shared. Neither must spare the other for a
mistaken sense of self-sacrifice. You would not hide your joys from me—
why, then, your sorrows? Again, I ask you: are you satisfied that I am
right?"

"You know," said Ferlie's muffled tones. "You know...."

 "Do I? Then I am going to extract a promise from you, here and now,
that you will be fair with me, as I have been fair with you. Did I lie to you
after the return of Hla Byu into our joint lives? Did I leave you and
withdraw to fight my battle alone when she drowned herself? I wonder
whether the earthly years make a difference, Ferlie, after all? I wonder
whether you are capable of understanding what love means to a man who
has lived nearly half a century without it, and who suddenly finds himself
face to face with its illimitable mysteries? Surely, you will admit the fact
that, since my probation has been double yours, I have earned the inevitable
right to lead before I follow?"

Even then she did not stir under the strengthening touch of his sensitive
fingers.

"Lead on," she said....

CHAPTER XVI

Said the Most Important Lady, she always knew that there was
something queer about it. "Looks as if the whole of his ultimate objections
to Mr. Maur were rooted in the fact that he knew Maur would probably let it
out."

"But how did Maur himself find it out?"

"Probably the girl told him."

"Sounds hardly possible. Why should she?"

"My dear! He is not a young man exactly and she was obviously
attracted by Maur. Hence these stripes!"

"Have you seen his face?"

 "The men are rather inclined to doubt Maur's version."

"My dear! The men! She'd have had them all in tow if she hadn't
suddenly concentrated upon Maur and disgusted everybody. Men are wax
when it comes to a red head and a white skin. Children!"

"But what does Maur exactly say?"

"Apparently Sterne saw green over the portrait-sittings and insulted

him. Maur referred him to his own little indiscretion and all parties began to
snarl about their rights. The girl appears to have played the part of passive
resister to both sides. That Type of Woman.... Well, Sterne lost his temper
and hit Maur unawares when he was quite defenceless, and then the girl
rushed between them and gave away the true relationship. From what one
gathers, she was infatuated with Maur—got him to paint her twice over for
an excuse to be with him—and, while he remained under the impression
that she was Sterne's widowed sister, he admits to having considered the
possibilities of matrimony. His discovery of what she really was—you
know they say the husband divorced her and is still alive?—startled him
into confessing that his feelings had altered in one respect.

"There was nothing for it then but for her to go home with Sterne; and
Maur can hardly be blamed for doing his duty by this credulous Station
which has also been suffering under the delusion that all was square and
above-board."

"For the sake of the natives alone, one's got to be so down upon That
Sort of Thing in this country."

"All the same," drawled the more tolerant voice of Somebody's

Husband, "I don't see how anybody has suffered particularly except the
Eternal Triangle. I've always considered Sterne a jolly decent fellow, and
Mrs. Clifford not nearly so red-haired as Maur has probably painted her."

"Well, I think the whole business is fishy. There's something horrid

about a household, in any case, which brazenly maintains that kind of
Burmese child; and John is probably the co-respondent's son of the divorce
case. The co-respondent can't be Sterne or, surely, he'd have married her.
Probably the real man bunked after marrying her, and Sterne, aware that his
own past would not bear too close a scrutiny, took pity on her and..."

"Aren't we getting on a little fast, Dolly? It makes a good story, I'll

admit, but we couldn't hold to it in the face of a summons for libel, and you
know you want to send the boys to Winchester."

In the bar one heard a good bit of low chuckling.

"And Diogenes wearing the air of a Trappist monk through the whole
joke!"

"All the same, when it comes to bringing a woman of that stamp into a
respectable God-fearing district, and introducing her to its wives and
daughters under false pretences, it's a bit thick."

"Of course he'll have to go."

"Good God, yes! He'll have to go."

"And I shouldn't be sorry to kick out Digby Maur along with him."

"Oh, Maur! His doings cut no ice. But, somehow, we have looked upon
Sterne as a creature with principles, and I, for one, am sorry for this smash-
up."

"Personally, I was dashed keen on the little lady."

"Well, none of the crowd were better than they should be. Still, I am
glad that someone has whacked Maur. I can't quite believe in his injured
innocence. If he didn't deserve a licking for this he's simply asked for it
elsewhere, for many moons. But I hate a rotten show of this sort in any
Station. I wish Sterne would hurry up and get out. But wherever they go in
Burma now, people can hardly be expected to call."

* * * * * *

Yes, most decidedly Cyprian would have to go. The children

complicated matters, particularly Thu Daw. Otherwise, things were made
easier by Peter's telegram which Cyprian had forgotten to give Ferlie until
the morning after that interview in Digby Maur's garden.

It was a long telegram explaining that Maddock had been invited to

betake himself, and party, on a visit to the Andaman Islands, where an old
friend of his was acting as Chief Commissioner.

"Bring John and come self Cyprian if possible," ended the telegram.

"It's so like Peter to prepay the reply in order to give me no time to

think," said Ferlie. "Do we go, Cyprian?"

That they should separate she did not contemplate for a moment. But he
glanced at Thu Daw before raising questioning eyes to her.

She picked up the gurgling golden-skinned atom and smiled at him over
its head.

"Why! We have no choice in the matter."

"I haven't, my dear, but you..."

"Have none either, then," said Ferlie.

He had sent in his resignation.

"And from now on," he said inconsequently, "it is to be the truth?"

"Why not?" she asked. "Can anything hurt us so long as we are

together?"

His answering smile was very wistful.

"I had great ideas of protecting and caring for the woman I loved when I
was twenty-eight," he said.

"And I had great ideas of protecting the man I loved when I was seven,"
said Ferlie.