“For shame!  I am disappointed in you,” Bertha said, half in jest, half in earnest.  “You are not at all the person I thought you were.  Whatever I may have fancied about you, I never imagined you a cynic or a grumbler.”

“I suppose it brings out the worst side of my nature, too,” he laughed.  “When you come down on board the Osprey, Miss Greendale, you will see the other side.  I fancy one falls into the tone of one’s surroundings.  Here I have caught the tone of the bored man of society, there you will see that I shall be a breezy sailor—­cheerful in storm or in calm, ready to take my glass and to toast my lass and all the rest of it in true nautical fashion.”

“I hope so,” she said, gravely.  “I shall certainly need something of the sort to correct the very unfavourable impression you have just been giving me.  Now let us change the subject.  You have not told me yet whether you had any flirtations in India.”

“Flirtations!” he repeated.  “For once, the small section of womankind that I encountered were above and beyond flirtations.

“I don’t think,” he went on seriously, “that you in England can quite realise what it was, or that a woman in London society can imagine that there can exist a state of things in which dress and appearance are matters which have altogether ceased to engross the female mind.  The white women I saw there were worn and haggard.  No matter what their age, they bore on their faces the impress of terrible hardship, terrible danger, and terrible grief and anxiety.  Few but had lost someone dear to them, many all whom they cared for.  A few had made some pitiful attempt at neatness, but most had lost all thought of self, all care whatever for personal appearance.  There was an anxious look in their eyes that was painful to witness.”

“I spoke without thinking,” the girl said, gravely.  “It must have been awful—­awful, as you say.  It is impossible for us really to imagine quite what it was, or to picture up such scenes as you must have witnessed.  I can understand that all this must seem frivolous and contemptible to you.”

“No, I don’t go so far as that,” he smiled.  “It is good that there should be butterflies as well as bees; and, at any rate, the women of India, who had the reputation of being as frivolous and pleasure-loving as the rest of their sex, came out nobly and showed a degree of patience under suffering and of heroic courage unsurpassable in history.

“I am afraid,” he said, as the hostess gave the signal for the ladies to rise, “you will long look back upon this dinner as one of unprecedented dullness.”

“Not dullness,” she smiled.  “Exceptional certainly, but as something so different from the usual thing, when one talks of nothing but the opera, the theatres and exhibitions, as to deserve to be put down in one’s diary by a mark.  I won’t flatter you by telling you whether a red or a black one.”

“Who are the party going to be, Mallett?” his friend Colonel Severn said, as they stood together on the deck of the Osprey early in August.  “You guaranteed that it would be a pleasant one when you persuaded me to leave London, for the first time since I retired, before shooting began.”