To which she made ardent answer, “Always happy in your arms, O king.”

And Merryon was happy also, though, looking back later, it seemed to him that he snatched his happiness on the very edge of the pit, and that even at the time he must have been half-aware of it.

When, a month after her coming, the scourge of the Plains caught her, as was inevitable, he felt as if his new-found kingdom had begun already to depart from him.

For a few days Puck was seriously ill with malaria.  She came through it with marvellous resolution, nursed by Merryon and his bearer, the general factotum of the establishment.

But it left her painfully weak and thin, and the colonel became again furiously insistent that she should leave the Plains till the rains were over.

Merryon, curiously enough, did not insist.  Only one evening he took the little wasted body into his arms and begged her—­actually begged her—­to consent to go.

“I shall be with you for the first fortnight,” he said.  “It won’t be more than a six-weeks’ separation.”

“Six weeks!” she protested, piteously.

“Perhaps less,” he said.  “I may be able to come to you for a day or two in the middle.  Say you will go—­and stay, sweetheart!  Set my mind at rest!”

“But, darling, you may be ill.  A thousand things may happen.  And I couldn’t go back to Shamkura.  I couldn’t!” said Puck, almost crying, clinging fast around his neck.

“But why not?” he questioned, gently.  “Weren’t they kind to you there?  Weren’t you happy?”

She clung faster.  “Happy, Billikins!  With that hateful Captain Silvester lying in wait to—­to make love to me!  I didn’t tell you before.  But that—­that was why I left.”

He frowned above her head.  “You ought to have told me before, Puck.”

She trembled in his arms.  “It didn’t seem to matter when once I’d got away; and I knew it would only make you cross.”

“How did he make love to you?” demanded Merryon.

He tried to see her face, but she hid it resolutely against him.  “Don’t, Billikins!  It doesn’t matter now.”

“It does matter,” he said, sternly.

Puck was silent.

Merryon continued inexorably.  “I suppose it was your own fault.  You led him on.”

She gave a little nervous laugh against his breast.  “I never meant to, Billikins.  I—­I don’t much like men—­as a rule.”

“You manage to conceal that fact very successfully,” he said.

She laughed again rather piteously.  “You don’t know me,” she whispered.  “I’m not—­like that—­all through.”

“I hope not,” said Merryon, severely.

She turned her face slightly upwards and snuggled it into his neck.  “You used not to mind,” she said.

He held her close in his arms the while he steeled himself against her.  “Well, I mind now,” he said.  “And I will have no more of it.  Is that clearly understood?”