Church’s approving glance. Nevertheless she had an agreeable tolerance for all that he found to do for her. She forbade herself, for the time being, any further analysis of a matter with which she meant to have in future little concern. In that anticipation she became unaccountably light-hearted and talkative and merry. So much so, that Captain Thrush, A.D.C., registered his conviction that she was really rather a pretty girl—more in her than he thought; and the Honourable Mr. Lewis Ancram said to himself that she was enjoying, in anticipation, the prestige she would have a month later, and that the cleverest of women were deplorably susceptible to social ambition. The Superintendent met them at the wharf, and John Church led the way up the great central avenue of palms, whose grey, shaven polls look as if they had been turned by some giant lathe, with his hand on the arm of this gentleman. The others arranged themselves with a single eye to avoiding the stupidity of walking with their own wives and trooped after. “We are going to the orchid-houses, John,” Mrs. Church called after her husband, as Sir William Scott brought them to a halt at a divergent road he loved; and Church took off his hat in hurried acquiescence. “Notice my new Dendrobium!” cried the Superintendent, turning a rueful countenance upon them. “The only one in Asia!” Then his head resumed its inclination of respectful attention, and the pair disappeared. Mrs. Church laughed frankly. “Poor Dr. James!” she exclaimed. “My husband is double-dyed in febrifuge to-day.” Ancram took the privilege—it was one he enjoyed—of gently rebuking her. “It is one of those common, urgent needs of the people,” he said, “that His Honour so intimately understands.” Judith looked at him with a sudden sweet humility in her eyes. “You are quite right,” she returned. “I sometimes think that nobody knows him as you do. Certainly,” she added, in a lower tone, as the two fell back, “nobody has more of his confidence, more of his dependence.” “I don’t know,” Ancram answered vaguely. “Do you really think so? I don’t know.” “I am sure of it.” He looked straight before him in silence, irritated in his sensitive morality—the morality which forbade him to send a Government _chuprassie_ on a private errand, or to write to his relations in England on office paper. A curve in the walk showed them Rhoda Daye, standing alone on the sward, beside a bush in crimson-and-orange flower, intently examining a spray. Almost involuntarily they paused, and Ancram turned his eyes upon Mrs. Church with the effect of asking her what he should do, what he must do. “Go!” she said; and then, as if it were a commonplace: “I think Miss Daye wants you. I will overtake the others.”