"Tell me, how do you come to be _here_ of all impossible places on earth?"

His voice was harder than he knew, and a slight shadow pa.s.sed across her face.

"Is it really necessary to explain?" she asked, coldly.

He relinquished her bridle at that.

"As you please, of course. Only--it is a little awkward our being here together; and it might be as well to come to some sort of understanding before we separate. Are you up here for the season?"

"Yes, we have been up all the winter, Michael and I, except for two months at Lah.o.r.e. When the snow melted we moved to the highest cottage on Bakrota. It is beautiful up there. We came out here eighteen months ago," she went on a trifle hurriedly, grateful, now that the ice was broken, for the relief of commonplace speech. "I had heard a good deal about India, you know. I wanted to see it for myself, and if possible put a little of it on canvas."

"And you are not disappointed?"

"No, indeed. It is wonderful beyond words."

They had themselves well in hand now. Each had given the other a false impression at the start, and when two people are living at cross-purposes it is easier to move mountains than to remove that most intangible of all barriers, a false impression.

"And are you--up for the season?" Quita added, after a pause, with a natural touch of hesitancy.

"No. Two months' leave. I am free, therefore, to go elsewhere, if my presence here is in the least degree . . . annoying to you."

"Oh, but that would be a pity. You must have had a special reason for choosing Dalhousie."

"Some friends of mine were coming up, and asked me to come too. But they will quite understand if I say I should prefer to go shooting beyond Chumba."

"Don't say it, though, please. I would really rather you did not put yourself out in the smallest degree on _my_ account. Besides," she added, achieving a rather uncertain smile, "we need not meet often, and no one--except Michael--will have any notion of . . . the truth."

"Of course not," he agreed, with glacial dignity. "I was forgetting that you had--discarded my name."

Again the blood flew to her cheeks.

"It seemed the simplest way to avoid possible complications, or unnecessary lies."

"And you flung away--my ring also?"

The question came out in spite of himself, for he had noted her ungloved left hand.

"No. Only I could not very well wear it--under the circ.u.mstances."

He stood aside now to let her pa.s.s. He himself then mounted, and followed her along the narrow path, raging against the irony of circ.u.mstance, as a man bites upon a sore tooth.

On reaching the s.p.a.ciousness of Bakrota Mall, he had no choice but to ride abreast of his companion. He did so without remark, and since Quita lacked courage to spur her pony to a canter, they continued to ride thus for a time; each, under an admirable mask of composure, painfully aware of the other's presence.

Speech seemed only likely to widen the gulf between them, and at all times Lenox had a large capacity for silence.

Not so Quita. The last ten minutes had been overcrowded with conflicting emotions; her husband's mute proximity got upon her nerves, and a setting of pine and mountain put a finishing touch to an already intolerable situation. She turned upon him at length, with a small gesture of defiance,--a well-remembered tilt of her chin that pierced him like a sword-thrust.

"Don't feel bound to escort me, please. I am constantly out alone.

You may have a long way to go; and we need hardly play at polite conventionalities--you and I."

He glanced at her keenly for a second.

"Thanks; I am in no hurry. But--if you would prefer it?"

"I think it would be less--uncomfortable for us both," she made answer desperately.

"In that case, of course . . ." He gathered up his reins, and lifted his hat, "At least I am glad to have been of some small service to you," he added, quietly. And before her brain or lips could formulate an answer, he had cantered off and vanished round a shoulder of the hill.

CHAPTER III.

"Flower o' the clove, All the Latin I construe is 'Amo, I love'!"

--Browning.

Quita drew rein and sat motionless for several seconds, looking straight before her.

"I wonder . . . I wonder very much," she mused, "exactly what one may infer from all that. Either he has superb self-control, or I have been wiped off the slate altogether. Most probably the latter."

Then she moved forward slowly, in a state of mind so complicated that, for all her skill in self-a.n.a.lysis, she could not unravel her own sensations. She only knew that she felt jarred through and through, and in a mood to give way to her most dare-devil impulses. But happily for her, no egregious piece of folly was ready to hand at the moment.

Her appearance in India was itself the outcome of an impulse generated by the arrival of two cheques, whose united figures took away her breath; and confirmed by the fact that Michael's relations with the inevitable woman of the moment threatened serious complications--for the woman. For Michael himself serious complications seemed out of all question. Frank Pagan though he was, he lacked, in a peculiar degree, the needful leavening of common clay. Love, as he knew it, was not inevitably based on pa.s.sion. It was his imagination rather than his heart that took fire, and only under the influence of a dominant emotion did he appear to be capable of the highest achievement.

Briefly, he was in love with Love, with that elixir of the heart that stirs the pulses, and quickens inspiration. The object loved stood second. But, so long as the enchantment held, so long as no new impression caught and whirled him in another direction, he honestly believed her to be supreme.

Hence complications, many and embarra.s.sing, which went far to interpret Quita's inconsequent flittings from one continental town to another.

For, although the younger by eighteen months, she was many years older in thought and character than her irresponsible brother; and in all matters of moment she took, and was expected to take, the lead.

The key to a perplexing character may often be found in the idiosyncrasies of its nearest and dearest; and this reversal of the natural order of things explained much in Quita that appeared _difficile_ and contradictory; explained also her instant gravitation to Lenox, in whom she divined a supply of moral force, and the masculine spirit of protection, both strangely undeveloped in the brother she so devoutly loved. And if at times the uncongenial task of conscience-keeper, and general financier, coupled with complexities, arising from her own false position, had proved something of a strain upon her, Michael had never yet discovered the fact. She understood and shared enough of his Pagan spirit to accept his emotional aids to self-expression at their true value. Do what he might, she could not find it in her heart to be angry with him for long. He carried his fine crop of failings with a cheerfulness and a.s.surance so engaging, that it seemed almost ungracious to be aware of them.

But there were moments when the woman in her rebelled, even to remonstrance, with small result; and when, at length, the arrival of two cheques coincided with Michael's announcement that a certain enamoured Countess obviously expected him to free her from the tyranny of an unloved husband, Quita had laughingly suggested India as an inviting means of escape from entanglements present and to come.

Half a night of meditation had sufficed to set her on the rock of decision. There were possibilities about India not to be named, even to her own heart. There were also empty s.p.a.ces where white women would be scarce, and where Michael must learn to work without the spur of a fict.i.tious stimulant.

Before the week was out, behold them ploughing through the Mediterranean, leaving the misguided Countess to pacify a suspicious husband. A summer in Kashmir, and a winter in a deserted Himalayan station, had confirmed Quita in the wisdom of their flight; and now her own unnamed possibility had been sprung upon her so suddenly, so strangely, that it took away her breath, and left her as yet neither glad nor sorry, but profoundly disturbed.

Arrived at her own turning, she relieved her feelings a little by getting Yorick at a canter up the twisted sc.r.a.p of a path that climbed to a wooden doll's house, christened by a poetical Hindu landlord, the "Crow's Nest." Perched on an impossible-looking slope of gravel and granite, eight thousand feet above the Punjab, it seemed only to be saved from falling headlong by an eight-foot ledge of earth, which Quita spoke of proudly as her "garden," and which actually boasted two strips of border aglow with early summer flowers. Here she found her _sais_ squatting on his heels; and springing from the saddle, dismissed Yorick without his customary lump of sugar.

On the steps of the trellised verandah she paused, nerving herself to recount her astonishing adventure in the right tone of voice, and instinctively her brain noted every detail of the view outspread before her. The golden stillness of morning rested on hill and valley like a benediction. Green cornfields, white watercourses, granite promontories, and black patches of forest--all were bathed in warmth and light without languor. The breath of the snows was still ice-cool, and exhilarating as wine; its freshness penetrated and enhanced by the faint sweet scent of Banksia roses, that clothed the rickety woodwork in a fairy garment of green and ivory-white. Each least sound was crystal clear in the rarefied air; the quarrelling of two sparrows, the high-pitched chatter from the compound behind the cottages, the crooning of ring-doves among the pines. b.u.t.terflies, like detached flowers, fluttered in and out. A faint breeze stirred the roses, so that an occasional creamy petal fell circling to the ground.

But for the first time Quita Maurice felt out of tune with it all. A disturbing element had thrust itself into her life, deranging its perspective, altering its values. She felt badly in need of common human sympathy, and the exalted calm of these high lat.i.tudes irritated rather than soothed her.

With an impatient sigh she turned to enter the house.

The gla.s.s doors of the centre room stood open, a characteristic room, half drawing-room, half studio; furnished mainly with two large easels, painting-stools, and cane chairs, yet bearing in every detail the stamp of Quita's iridescent personality. A pianette, a violin, a litter of music, and back numbers of the 'Art Journal' occupied one corner. A revolving bookcase showed an inviting array of books. Her own canvas was hidden by draperies of dull gold silk, and beside it, on a carved stool, sprays of Banksia roses and honeysuckle soared plumelike from a vase of beaten bronze.

Before the second easel Michael stood, with his back towards her, brush and palette in hand, head critically tilted, his velveteen coat sagging a little from rounded shoulders. Absorbed in his picture, he was quite unconscious of her presence. This irritated her also to an unjustifiable extent. Her vanity had suffered recent shock, and an unreasoning longing possessed her to be cared for, to be supremely needed.