“He seemed to be shy of them,” laughed Mrs. Winnie.  “He said it had a tendency to lead one into dangerous fields.  But oh!  I forgot—­I asked my swami also, and it didn’t startle him.  They are used to ghosts; they believe that souls keep coming back to earth, you know.  I think if it was his ghost, I wouldn’t mind seeing it—­for he has such beautiful eyes.  He gave me a book of Hindu legends—­and there was such a sweet story about a young princess who loved in vain, and died of grief; and her soul went into a tigress; and she came in the night-time where her lover lay sleeping by the firelight, and she carried him off into the ghost-world.  It was a most creepy thing—­I sat out here and read it, and I could imagine the terrible tigress lurking in the shadows, with its stripes shining in the firelight, and its green eyes gleaming.  You know that poem—­we used to read it in school—­’Tiger, tiger, burning bright!’”

It was not very easy for Montague to imagine a tigress in Mrs. Winnie’s conservatory; unless, indeed, one were willing to take the proposition in a metaphorical sense.  There are wild creatures which sleep in the heart of man, and which growl now and then, and stir their tawny limbs, and cause one to start and turn cold.  Mrs. Winnie wore a dress of filmy softness, trimmed with red flowers which paled beside her own intenser colouring.  She had a perfume of her own, with a strange exotic fragrance which touched the chorus of memory as only an odour can.  She leaned towards him, speaking eagerly, with her soft white arms lying upon the basin’s rim.  So much loveliness could not be gazed at without pain; and a faint trembling passed through Montague, like a breeze across a pool.  Perhaps it touched Mrs. Winnie also, for she fell suddenly silent, and her gaze wandered off into the darkness.  For a minute or two there was stillness, save for the pulse of the fountain, and the heaving of her bosom keeping time with it.

And then in the morning Oliver inquired, “Where were you, last night?” And when his brother answered, “At Mrs. Winnie’s,” he smiled and said, “Oh!” Then he added, gravely, “Cultivate Mrs. Winnie—­you can’t do better at present.”

CHAPTER XI

Montague accepted his friend’s invitation to share her pew at St. Cecilia’s, and next Sunday morning he and Alice went, and found Mrs. Winnie with her cousin.  Poor Charlie had evidently been scrubbed and shined, both physically and morally, and got ready to appeal for “one more chance.”  While he shook hands with Alice, he was gazing at her with dumb and pleading eyes; he seemed to be profoundly grateful that she did not refuse to enter the pew with him.