The Commissioner tried to look shocked, but failed; the smooth card still lay in his hand, the lovely image impressed on it smiled up at him.

“I don’t know but what you are right,” he muttered savagely as he handed it back to Hamilton.  “These wives, damn ’em, seem to have no other mission but to make a man uncomfortable.”

He got up and began to pace the room.  He seemed to have forgotten Hamilton and the official role he himself had started to play.  He seemed absorbed in his own thoughts—­perhaps memories.  Hamilton sat still, gazing at the card.

Half-an-hour later the interview came to an end.  Hamilton went away to his office with a light heart, and a smile on his lips.  The Commissioner had given him some of his own reminiscences, and Hamilton had sympathised.  The two men had drifted insensibly onto common ground, and the Commissioner finally had promised to help Hamilton as far as he could.  Hamilton was pleased.  That he had merely been twisting a piece of straw, that would be bent into quite another shape when Mrs. Commissioner took it in hand, did not for the moment occur to him.  That night Saidie danced for him in the moonlight, and afterwards ran from him swiftly, playing at hide-and-seek amongst the roses laughing, inviting his pursuit.  In and out behind the great clumps of boughain-villia gleamed the lovely form, with hair unbound falling like a mantle to the waist.  Through the pomegranate bushes the laughing face looked out at him, then swiftly vanished as he approached, and next a laugh and a flash of warm skin drew him to the bed of lilies where he overtook her, and they fell laughing on the mossy bank together.  Wearied with dancing and running and laughter, she sank into his arms gladly, as Eve in the garden of Eden.

“Let us sleep here,” she murmured, looking up to the palm branches over them defined against the lustrous sky.

“See how the lilies sleep round us!”

And that night they slept out in the moonlight.

CHAPTER IV

A month had gone by, and during that month, except for the time he was with Saidie in the bungalow, Hamilton, had he been less of a philosopher, would have been extremely uncomfortable.

The Commissioner’s wife had completely and entirely espoused the cause of Mrs. Hamilton, and had insisted on her leaving the hotel and coming to stay with her.  Everywhere that the Commissioner’s wife went, riding or driving, Mrs. Hamilton accompanied her; and whenever he met the two women, his wife threw him a mild, reproachful glance of martyred virtue, while the Commissioner’s wife glared upon him in stony wrath.