So Kitty and her companion, and I and my ghostly Light-o’-Love, crept round Jakko in couples.  The road was streaming with water; the pines dripped like roof-pipes on the rocks below, and the air was full of fine, driving rain.  Two or three times I found myself saying to myself almost aloud:  “I’m Jack Pansay on leave at Simla—­at Simla! Everyday, ordinary Simla.  I mustn’t forget that—­I mustn’t forget that.”  Then I would try to recollect some of the gossip I had heard at the Club; the prices of So-and-So’s horses—­anything, in fact, that related to the work-a-day Anglo-Indian world I knew so well.  I even repeated the multiplication-table rapidly to myself, to make quite sure that I was not taking leave of my senses.  It gave me much comfort; and must have prevented my hearing Mrs. Wessington for a time.

Once more I wearily climbed the Convent slope and entered the level road.  Here Kitty and the man started off at a canter, and I was left alone with Mrs. Wessington.  “Agnes,” said I, “will you put back your hood and tell me what it all means?” The hood dropped noiselessly and I was face to face with my dead and buried mistress.  She was wearing the dress in which I had last seen her alive:  carried the same tiny handkerchief in her right hand; and the same card-case in her left. (A woman eight months dead with a card-case!) I had to pin myself down to the multiplication-table, and to set both hands on the stone parapet of the road to assure myself that that at least was real.

“Agnes,” I repeated, “for pity’s sake tell me what it all means.”  Mrs. Wessington leant forward, with that odd, quick turn of the head I used to know so well, and spoke.

If my story had not already so madly overleaped the bounds of all human belief I should apologize to you now.  As I know that no one—­no, not even Kitty, for whom it is written as some sort of justification of my conduct—­will believe me, I will go on.  Mrs. Wessington spoke and I walked with her from the Sanjowlie road to the turning below the Commander-in-Chief’s house as I might walk by the side of any living woman’s ’rickshaw, deep in conversation.  The second and most tormenting of my moods of sickness had suddenly laid hold upon me, and like the prince in Tennyson’s poem, “I seemed to move amid a world of ghosts.”  There had been a garden-party at the Commander-in-Chief’s, and we two joined the crowd of homeward-bound folk.  As I saw them then it seemed that they were the shadows—­impalpable fantastic shadows—­that divided for Mrs. Wessington’s ’rickshaw to pass through.  What we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot—­indeed, I dare not—­tell.  Heatherlegh’s comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been “mashing a brain-eye-and-stomach chimera.”  It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a marvelously dear experience.  Could it be possible, I wondered, that I was in this life to woo a second time the woman I had killed by my own neglect and cruelty?