She straightened in her seat and shrugged her shoulders with a gesture she had never used before, that had come very lately:  come concomitantly with the arrival of the woman Elizabeth.  “Anyway, I think it will be all right.  I at least am not afraid of your eloping with someone else.”  She laughed again at the thought and folded her hands carefully in her lap.  “It’s quite impossible to think of you interfering with the property of someone else; even though that property were a girl.”

Mechanically the Indian chirruped to the team and shook the reins.  On his face the look of perplexity deepened.  Instinctively he realised that something was wrong; but how to set it right he did not know, and, true to his instincts, waited.

“You wouldn’t be afraid in the least to do so,” wandered on the girl, “even though the woman were another man’s wife.  You aren’t afraid of anything.  You’d take her from before his very eyes if you’d decided to do so, if you saw fit.  It’s not that.  It merely would never occur to you; not even as possibility.”

Still groping, the man looked at her, looked at her full; but no light came.

“Yes, you’re right, Bess,” he corroborated haltingly.  “It would never occur to me to do so.”

More ironically than before laughed fate; and again with the voice of Elizabeth Landor.

“You’re humorous, How, deliciously humorous; and still you haven’t the vestige of a sense of humour.”  She laughed again involuntarily.  “I hadn’t myself a few weeks ago.  I think I was even more deficient than you; but now—­now—­” Once again the tense-strung laugh, while in her lap the crossed hands locked and grew white from mutual pressure.  “Now of a sudden I seem to see humour in everything!”

More than perplexed, concerned, distressed from his very inability to fathom the new mood, the man again brought the team to a walk, fumbled with the reins impotently.

“Something’s wrong, Bess,” he hesitated.  “Something’s worrying you.  Tell me what it is, won’t you?”

“Wrong?” The girl returned the look fair, almost defiantly.  “Wrong?” Still again the laugh; unmusical, hysterical.  “Certainly nothing is wrong.  What could be wrong when two people who have so much in common as you and I, who touch at so many places, are just married and alone?  Wrong:  the preposterous idea!”

She was silent, and of a sudden the all-surrounding stillness seemed to be intensified.  For at last, at last the man understood and was looking at her; looking at her wordlessly, with an expression that was terrible in its haunting suggestion of unutterable sadness, of infinite pain.  He did not say a word; he merely looked at her; but shade by shade as the seconds passed there vanished from his face to the last bit every trace of the glory that had been its predecessor.  Not until it was gone did the girl realise to the full what she had done, realise the mortal stab she had inflicted; then of a sudden came realisation in a gust and contrition unspeakable.  Swiftly as rain follows a thunderclap her mood changed, her own face, hysterically tense, relaxed in a flood of tears.  In an abandon of remorse her arms were about him, her face was pressed close to his face.