"It might, if I had not heard a good deal of it before. You are chronically devoted to one or other of us, my beloved Pagan! That's the root of the difficulty."

In atonement for directness of speech, she laid hands upon his shoulders, and smiled very tenderly into his face.

"I am chronically devoted to you, _coeur de mon coeur_," he declared in all sincerity. "That is the only form of it I have yet known."

His reward was a b.u.t.terfly kiss between the eyebrows.

"Out of your own mouth you stand condemned! It is quite charming for me; and for the rest--one accepts the unavoidable! But in sober prosaic truth, Michel, Elsie Mayhew is a great deal too good for you; and that nice Engineer boy, Mr Malcolm, is desperately in earnest about her, I have seen his whole heart in his eyes when he looks at her----"

"_Mais, ma chere_, what a serious derangement of his organism!" Michael broke in with irreverent laughter. "When all's said, the heart is a practical machine--even the heart of a lover, and a little of it must have been left below for pumping purposes!"

She stamped her foot in helpless irritation.

"Michel, how exasperating you are! Can't you see that I am in earnest?"

"Like my incomparable rival?" he queried unabashed. "Poor devil! I wish him no harm. Is it my fault, after all, if the lady prefers a man who is not cut out on a pattern, and filed for reference at the War Office? He is immaculate, _ce cher Malcolm_, from his parting to the toes of his boots. And, _ma foi_, he is clean--like all that redoubtable army of British officers--aggressively clean, inside and out, which one cannot always say with truth! But he has no finesse, no _savoir faire_ where women are concerned. If he is in earnest let him try weapons more compelling than his _beaux yeux_. A man was not given lips and a pair of hands for eating and fighting merely; and if he cannot turn them to good account, he deserves the fate that will a.s.suredly be his."

Quita's sigh, as she turned impatiently away, may have arisen from a pa.s.sing thought of that other, who had also been remiss in putting lips and hands to their legitimate use, and had reaped disaster accordingly.

She took off her helmet, as if suddenly aware of its weight, and tossed it into a chair.

"Is Miss Mayhew giving you another sitting after our sunrise picnic, on Dynkund, to-morrow?" she asked in a changed voice.

"Yes, and I intend that she shall stay on for tiffin also."

"Then I will persuade Major Garth to follow suit, so that we may be a _parti carre_. And now, as it's more than half-past breakfast-time, we might begin to think about sitting down! I believe Major Garth is riding up this morning with some books I lent him, and I must get forward a little with my picture before he comes."

"His office hours seem to have become a negligible quant.i.ty lately,"

Maurice remarked casually, his eyes on Elsie's face.

"Yes, I told him so a few days ago, apparently without much effect.

Major Garth is one of those men who combine a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of work with the capacity for securing good appointments, which is quite an achievement--of its kind. I suppose I must gently point out to him that now the station is waking up it would be well to consider the proprieties a little more than we have done so far; or the 'b.u.t.ton Quail' will be forbidding Elsie the house. She is volubly disapproving already, denounces him as a 'dangerous man' . . .

delectable adjective! But the cackle of Quails is nothing to me. So long as the man behaves himself, and amuses me, I shall continue to see just as much of him as I think fit."

Major Garth, it may be mentioned in pa.s.sing, had lately secured the coveted post of Station Staff Officer. He also had spent the winter months in Dalhousie; and he could by no means be reckoned among the men who fail with women through undue fastidiousness in regard to ways and means.

CHAPTER IV.

"A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter."--_Eccles_.

"Tired already? Nonsense! The air at this height is pure elixir vitae. It gives one a foretaste of the joy of being disembodied! I feel five years younger since I left the bungalow."

"And I, on the other hand, feel uncomfortably aware that I shall never see the forty-third milestone again!" And, seating himself deliberately on the trunk of a fallen deodar, James Garth looked up at his companion, where she stood above him on a rough-hewn block of granite, her alpenstock held high like a shepherd's crook, the slender, shapely form of her outlined upon a sky already athrill with the foreknowledge of dawn.

Standing thus, lightly poised, impatient of delay, slim and upright as a young birch-tree, a cl.u.s.ter of roses at her waist, her expressive face shadowed by the wide-brimmed helmet, she appeared triumphantly, girlishly young, for all her eight-and-twenty years. Her cheeks glowed; irrepressible animation sparkled in her eyes. The shock and jar of twenty-four hours ago seemed forgotten, as though they had never been, for Quita Maurice was blessed with the happy faculty of living vividly and exclusively in the present, and the exhilaration of ascent, the prospect of watching the world's awakening from a pine-crowned pinnacle, nine thousand feet up, were, for the moment, all-sufficing.

James Garth, in his upward glance, appraised every detail of her dress and person; savoured to the full her very individual--if, at times, thorn-set--charm. He was a connoisseur of woman--of their moods, their minor vanities, their methods of defence and attack--this man whose career had been mainly remarkable for a succession of sentimental friendship, innocuous and otherwise.

During the past air months he had spent an infinite deal of leisure in a pastime whose every move and countermove he knew by heart, and for the first time in eighteen years he had found himself out of his reckoning.

An element little known to him had upset the balance of power. He was beginning to be aware that, for all his unquenchable self-a.s.surance, he had never for one moment felt sure of this woman, whose companionship was so accessible, and whose inner self stood always just out of reach, airy, impregnable, and by a natural sequence, the more entirely desirable. It had taken Garth some months to realise the truth: and on this morning of golden promise he decided that Quita Maurice must be made to realise it also.

Quita herself, meeting the eloquence of his eyes with that frank look of hers which had been largely responsible for the unprecedented turn of affairs, was vainly trying to repress a mischievous enjoyment of the fact that her companion was patently out of his element; that his drawing-room att.i.tudes and demeanour struck an almost ludicrous note of discord with the untamed majesty of his surroundings.

Face, figure, and point-device attire, culminating in a b.u.t.tonhole of freshly picked violets, stamped him as a man mentally and physically addicted to the levels of life; a soldier of carpet conquests and ball-room achievements. A brow not ill-formed, and a bold pair of eyes, more green than brown, suggested some measure of cultivated intelligence, without which Quita could not have endured his companionship for many hours together. But the proportions of his thick-set figure, and a certain amplitude of chin and jaw, bewrayed him; cla.s.sed him indubitably with the type for whom comfort and leisure are the first and last words of life. The fact that he had ascended a matter of fifteen hundred feet before daybreak, and that with no more than the mildest sense of martyrdom, was proof conclusive that the balance of power had been very completely upset; and it is quite in keeping with the delicate irony of things that the one woman who had succeeded in upsetting it was, at that moment, dissecting him with the merciless accuracy of the artist.

"Poor man!" she remarked, sympathetically. "I'm afraid I have been treating you rather mercilessly; and you don't look particularly happy sitting on that deodar, either! I suppose I may consider it something of a triumph to have dragged a high priest of the arm-chair unprotesting up to the heights at this unearthly hour of the morning?"

"A triumph exclusively your own," he answered, with lingering emphasis.

"No other woman in the world could have achieved as much."

Quita glanced at him quizzically.

"I honestly wonder," she said slowly, "if you could reckon up at random how many times you have said that sort of thing before."

Garth reddened visibly; less at the justice of the retort than at the humiliation of being put out of countenance by a woman from whom he desired no less a gift than the gift of herself.

"Well, I never meant it fair and square before," he declared stoutly.

Whereat, to his consternation, she laughed outright.

"You seem to have a high opinion of my powers of credulity! That is too big a compliment for me to digest without salt! But I think we have talked nonsense enough for one while, and it's growing lighter every minute. Are you coming on? Or would you sooner sit there in peace while I push up to the top?"

The suggestion brought him to his feet.

"No, by no means. When I set out to do a thing, I go through with it."

"Rally your forces, then, for one more spurt of climbing. Time is precious. Can you really manage this formidable boulder, or would you like a hand up?"

She laughingly flung out her free left hand; and the mockery in her clear voice fired the man to make good his opportunity. He took prompt possession of the proffered hand, crushing it in his with unnecessary force, but made no attempt to scale the rock; while she, instantly perceiving his manoeuvre, sprang down to his side and freed herself with imperious decision. Then she turned upon him, her head held high, a spark of genuine scorn in her eyes; and he realised that he was dealing with no mere coquette, whose elusiveness might be taken as an inverted form of encouragement, but with a woman of character and spirit.

"Major Garth," she said in a tone of quietness more cutting than anger, "when I pay a man the compliment of going out alone with him, I take it for granted that he is in the habit of behaving like a gentleman. I should be sorry to find myself mistaken in your case."

Without giving him time to answer, she leapt lightly on to her deserted rock, leaving him to follow, if he chose.

And he did choose. For her scorn, while it stung his vanity to the quick, fired his lukewarm blood with a l.u.s.t of conquest far removed from his usual cool-headed a.s.surance at the critical moment. He seemed destined to experience more than one new sensation this morning; and new sensations rarely came amiss to this epicure of the emotions.

Being quite incapable of emulating his companion's chamois method of cutting corners, and striking out a direct line for the summit, he did not succeed in coming up with her till the arduous feat was accomplished,--the Pisgah height attained. Here he found her established on a slab of granite, hands loosely clasped over her knee, helmet tilted a little backward, forming a halo round her head and face. He arrived in a very unheroic state of breathlessness, and she greeted him with a frankly forgiving smile.

"That last bit came rather hard on you, I'm afraid. But surely all this makes ample amends."

She included in a wide sweep of her arm the superb panorama of hill and valley and far-stretching plain, robed in a haze of its own tierce breath, through which a silver network of rivers could be faintly discerned in the crescent light. Uprising from this blue interminable distance, the first crumplings of the foothills showed like purple velvet, and from these again the giant Himalayas--the "home of the greater G.o.ds"--sprang aloft, in a medley of lovely lines and hues, till they reached the uttermost north where the h.o.a.r head of Nanga Parbat soared twenty-five thousand feet into the blue.

Quita motioned her companion to another rock, a little distance behind her own.

"Sit down there, and recover your lost breath," she commanded, gently.