She used, in fact, to take her letter-writing and sewing to the sweet, secluded place and spend hours of pure, restful bliss.  It seemed to her that her life became more lovely day by day.

[Illustration:  Hester Osborn]

Hester did not like the pool.  She thought it too lonely and silent.  She preferred her beflowered boudoir or the sunny garden.  Sometimes in these days she feared to follow her own thoughts.  She was being pushed—­pushed towards the edge of her precipice, and it was only the working of Nature that she should lose her breath and snatch at strange things to stay herself.  Between herself and her husband a sort of silence had grown.  There were subjects of which they never spoke, and yet each knew that the other’s mind was given up to thought of them day and night.  There were black midnight hours when Hester, lying awake in her bed, knew that Alec lay awake in his also.  She had heard him many a time turn over with a caught breath and a smothered curse.  She did not ask herself what he was thinking of.  She knew.  She knew because she was thinking of the same things herself.  Of big, fresh, kind Emily Walderhurst lost in her dreams of exultant happiness which never ceased to be amazed and grateful to prayerfulness; of the broad lands and great, comfortable houses; of all it implied to be the Marquis of Walderhurst or his son; of the long, sickening voyage back to India; of the hopeless muddle of life in an ill-kept bungalow; of wretched native servants, at once servile and stubborn and given to lies and thefts.  More than once she was forced to turn on her face that she might smother her frenzied sobs in her pillow.

It was on such a night—­she had awakened from her sleep to notice such stillness in Osborn’s adjoining room, that she thought him profoundly asleep—­that she arose from her bed to go and sit at her open window.

She had not been seated there many minutes before she became singularly conscious, she did not know how, of some presence near her among the bushes in the garden below.  It had indeed scarcely seemed to be sound or movement which had attracted her attention, and yet it must have been one or both, for she involuntarily turned to a particular spot.

Yes, something, someone, was standing in a corner, hidden by shrubbery.  It was the middle of the night, and people were meeting.  She sat still and almost breathless.  She could hear nothing and saw nothing but, between the leafage, a dim gleam of white.  Only Ameerah wore white.  After a few seconds’ waiting she began to think a strange thing, though she presently realised that, taking all things into consideration, it was not strange at all.  She got up very noiselessly and stole into her husband’s room.  He was not there; the bed was empty, though he had slept there earlier in the night.

She went back to her own bed and got into it again.  In ten minutes’ time Captain Osborn crept upstairs and returned to bed also.  Hester made no sign and did not ask any questions.  She knew he would have told her nothing, and also she did not wish to hear.  She had seen him speaking to Ameerah in the lane a few days before, and now that he was meeting her in the night she knew that she need not ask herself what the subject of their consultation might be.  But she looked haggard in the morning.