“This is a sort of wind-up day of my happiness,” he muttered, as he took his place at the office table.  “Well, I suppose no one could expect such pleasure as I have had these last three months to continue; but, whatever happens, Saidie and I will stick together.”  He sat musing for a moment, staring with unseeing eyes at the pile of work in front of him.

“Saidie, my Saidie!  I shall never part from her; therefore I can never part from my happiness.”  He smiled a little at the play on the words, and then commenced his day’s labours.

That evening, when he returned, Saidie noticed at once the depression in his usually gay, bright manner.  When they were alone at dinner she laid her hand on his.

“What has darkened the light of my lord’s countenance?” she asked softly.

Hamilton drew from his pocket his wife’s letter, and laid it beside her plate.

“Can you read that, Saidie?  If so, you will know all about it.”

The girl leaned one elbow on the table and bent over the letter, studying it.  She had been trying hard to improve herself in the language, of which she knew already something, and with Oriental quickness, had acquired much in the past three months.  She made out the sense now easily enough.

“This lady is a wife of yours?” she said quickly, with a swift upward glance at him, when she had finished reading the letter.

Hamilton laughed a little.

“She was my wife till I saw you, Saidie.  No one is my wife now, nor ever will be, but you.”

A soft glow of supreme pleasure and pride lighted up Saidie’s great lustrous eyes.  She bent her head and put her soft lips to his hand.

“Have you forbidden this wife to come to you?” she asked after a minute.

“Yes, I have; but she will come all the same.  English wives think it foolish to obey their husbands.”

He laughed sardonically, and Saidie looked bewildered and horrified.

* * * * *

A month later, a long, lean woman sat in a deck chair on board an Indian liner as it crossed the enchanted waters of the Indian Ocean.  Enchanted, for surely it is some magician’s touch that makes these waters such a rich and glorious blue!  How they roll so gently, full of majestic beauty, crested with sunlight, under the ships they carry so lightly!  How the gold light leaps over them, how the azure sky above laughs down to their tranquil mirror! how the gleaming flying-fish rise in their glinting cloud, whirl over them, and then softly disappear into their mysterious embrace!

The long, lean woman saw none of the magic round her.  Her dull, boiled-looking eyes gazed through the soft sunlight without seeing it.  In her lap lay a thin foreign letter and a telegram, together with a copy of “Anna Lombard” that she was reading with the strongest disapproval.  She picked up the letter and glanced through it again, though she knew it nearly by heart, especially one passage: