The word that fell in the hot still morning lived ever afterwards in Jack’s mind with the heavy scent of tropical flowers, the restless quiver of the air, and the sharp metallic stroke of a coppersmith’s beak near by. She was unhappy, and pretty, and clinging—and she loved him. Had he any right to make her love him so, and then leave her to a bitter and miserable marriage? So pity spoke, and the beauty of the girl’s lithe form, the curl of hair just escaping the uplifted hand, the delicate scent she used, the whole scene with its setting of the old hot Indian garden spoke to passion. And when pity and passion speak at the same moment, reason, sense, and self-control fade fast away. He took her hands from her face; she looked at him as a startled child would look; he felt the beating of her heart; he drew her closer to him, and she made no resistance. “Gladys, Gladys, will you be happy with _me_, darling?” he asked her. “Oh, Jack!” she cried, “you never even asked me—if I loved you!” An hour later, radiant, triumphant, cruel, Gladys stood before Tom Huntly. “I am not going back to England with you,” she said. “I am going to marry Jack Hurstly. I shall stay with Mrs. Collins till the wedding, and come home with Jack, for good.” Tom Huntly looked at her, alive and young! and upstairs lay the body of his wife, and the girl could be so happy! “Are you quite heartless?” he asked wearily. The insolence of her joy turned to weak self-pity, and she began to cry again. “Oh, poor, poor Mary!” she sobbed. “She _so_ wanted to help me choose my trousseau!” Tom left the room, shutting the door after him. Jack went back to his quarters. He wondered why the scent she wore seemed so familiar. He remembered at last that Edith le Mentier had used it too, and he remembered at the same time with equal irrelevancy that Muriel never used scent. That evening he had a long talk with Tom Huntly. His friendship with Mary had been a deep and real one, and he thought Gladys must have been mistaken about Tom’s brutality. He was not that sort of man; and he thought Tom was equally mistaken when he said rather doubtfully, “I hope you will be happy with Gladys; she’s not half up to the form of that other girl of yours.” Any reference to Muriel was peculiarly irritating to him just now. It also seemed that people who knew Gladys very well did not appreciate her so deeply as people who knew her slightly—a trait which is certainly a trifle unfortunate in a man’s future wife. But he had burned his boats, and he remembered how pretty she was, and tried to think it very natural that the day after his engagement he should find his _fiancée_ playing love-songs on the piano to her very distant connection, Jim Musgrave. CHAPTER XXVIII “Is she not pure gold, my mistress?”