‘Very few men understand your devotion thoroughly.’

‘Oh, Polly, don’t laugh at me! I give men up from this hour. I could have killed him then and there. What right had this man—this Thing I had picked out of his filthy paddy - fields—to make love to me?’

‘He did that, did he?’

‘He did. I don’t remember half he said, I was so angry. Oh, but such a funny thing happened! I can’t help laughing at it now, though I felt nearly ready to cry with rage. He raved and I stormed—I’m afraid we must have made an awful noise in our kala juggah. Protect my character, dear, if it’s all over Simla by to-morrow—and then he bobbed forward in the middle of this insanity—I firmly believe the man’s demented—and kissed me.’

‘Morals above reproach,’ purred Mrs. Mallowe.

‘So they were—so they are! It was the most absurd kiss. I don’t believe he’d ever kissed a woman in his life before. I threw my head back, and it was a sort of slidy, pecking dab, just on the end of the chin—here.’ Mrs. Hauksbee tapped her masculine little chin with her fan. ‘Then, of course, I was furiously angry, and told him that he was no gentleman, and I was sorry I’d ever met him, and so on. He was crushed so easily then I couldn’t be very angry. Then I came away straight to you.’

‘Was this before or after supper?’

‘Oh! before—oceans before. Isn’t it perfectly disgusting?’

‘Let me think. I withhold judgment till tomorrow. Morning brings counsel.’

But morning brought only a servant with a dainty bouquet of Annandale roses for Mrs. Hauksbee to wear at the dance at Viceregal Lodge that night.

‘He doesn’t seem to be very penitent,’ said Mrs. Mallowe. ‘What’s the billet-doux in the centre?’

Mrs. Hauksbee opened the neatly-folded note,—another accomplishment that she had taught Otis,—read it, and groaned tragically.

‘Last wreck of a feeble intellect! Poetry! Is it his own, do you think? Oh, that I ever built my hopes on such a maudlin idiot!’

‘No. It’s a quotation from Mrs. Browning, and in view of the facts of the case, as Jack says, uncommonly well chosen. Listen—

‘I didn’t—I didn’t—I didn’t!’—said Mrs. Hauksbee angrily, her eyes filling with tears; ‘there was no malice at all. Oh, it’s too vexatious!’

‘You’ve misunderstood the compliment,’ said Mrs. Mallowe. ‘He clears you completely and—ahem—I should think by this, that he has cleared completely too. My experience of men is that when they begin to quote poetry they are going to flit. Like swans singing before they die, you know.’

‘Polly, you take my sorrows in a most unfeeling way.’