She turned to the big white building beyond the cottage as if to escape into another subject; and Philip turned also. "Is it,--is it getting along nicely?" he asked dutifully. "Yes, dear," she replied, looking at him again with a smile; "but we shall have time to talk of that by and by. You haven't given me half the budget of news. And do you know, Phil, I begin to suspect that in writing you tell all the pleasant things and keep back the disagreeables. Now that isn't fair; as children say, it spoils the game." "Does it? Well, I won't do it again. Let me see what is the most unpleasant story I have heard for the last few months. Ah--yes! that is about the worst." He paused with a frown. "Well?" "Only Shunker Dâs is dead. That isn't very distressful; but you remember Kirpo?" "Why, Philip, it was her husband who--" "Yes, of course, of course; but I was not thinking of that; only of the day when she came out of the coolies' hut with a child in her arms, and told us why he was called Nuttu. Well, it is a horrid story, Belle, but that pitiless old fatalist the Khân, who was my informant, saw the hand of high heaven in it. Shunker got the telegram informing him that he was to be made a _Rai Bahâdur_, and another announcing his son's death by the same messenger. Ghastly, wasn't it? He had a fit, and though he lived for some weeks they never could understand a word he said, though he talked incessantly. One can imagine what he wanted from the sequel. Well, at his funeral-pyre, up turns Kirpo with a strapping boy of about eight years old, and there was an awful scene. She swore it was Shunker's son, and made the child defile the ashes. Do you remember her face that day, and how I said she hated somebody? Great Heavens! there is something perfectly devilish in the idea of such a revenge." "And yet we talk calmly enough of the sins of the fathers being visited on the children." She paused as the church clock struck eleven. "It is time I went to see my bairns, Phil. Will you come too? They will be at their best; the out-ones just in from the garden, the in-ones ready for their midday rest. They look so comfortable all tucked up in their cots." The bravest man winces sometimes, and Philip, despite the five years, had never forgotten that day of mirk and fog when he had first seen John Raby's child, and Belle had bidden him go away if he could not be satisfied with what she had to give him. To be satisfied, or go away! Both, it had seemed to him then, equally impossible; yet he had done both. Still the memory was painful. "You are going to build the new wing next year, I suppose?" he said as indifferently as he could when, leaving the shady wilderness, they made their way along the gravel walks which were seamed in every direction by the wheel-marks of invalid carriages.