She stepped with a rattle of pebbles into the wide main road round the mountain, and there stood for a moment undecided. It was the chief road, the Mall; and if she turned to the right it would lead her past the half-dozen tiny European shops that clung to the side of the hill, past the hotels and the club, and through the expansion where the band played in the afternoon, where there were benches and an admirable view, and where new-comers to Darjiling invariably sat for two or three days and contentedly occupied themselves with processes of oxygenation. This part of the Mall was frequented and fashionable; even at that hour she would meet her acquaintances on hill ponies and her mother’s friends in dandies and her mother’s friends’ babies in perambulators, with a plentiful background of slouching Bhutia coolies, their old felt hats tied on with their queues, and red-coats from a recuperating regiment, and small black-and-white terriers. It was not often that this prospect attracted her; she had discovered a certain monotony in its cheerfulness some time before; but to-day she had to remind herself of that discovery before she finally decided to turn to the left instead. She had another reason: if she went that way it might look to Philip Doyle as if she wanted to meet him. Why this gentleman should have come to so extraordinary a conclusion on the data at his disposal Miss Daye did not pause to explain. She was quite certain that he would, so she turned to the left. It suited her mood, when once she had taken that direction, to walk very fast. She had an undefined sense of keeping pace with events; her vigorous steps made a rhythm for her buoyant thought, and helped it out. She was entirely occupied with the way in which she would explain to Mr. Doyle how it was that she was not married to Lewis Ancram. She anticipated a pleasure in this, and she thought it was because Doyle would be gratified, on his friend’s account. He had never liked the match—she clung to that impression in all humility—he would perhaps approve of her breaking it off. Rhoda felt a little excited satisfaction at the idea of being approved of by Philip Doyle. She put the words with which she would tell him into careful phrases as she walked, constructing and reconstructing them, while Buzz kept an erratic course before her with inquisitive pauses by the wayside and vain chasing of little striped squirrels that whisked about the boles of the trees. Buzz, she thought, had never been more idiotically amusing.