Neurasthenic shock was a very fine diagnosis. But it was a question, after all—he lit his cheroot—whether a "damn queer state" did not more aptly picture the actual condition of affairs. * * * * * The receipt of a letter from Lady Aspasia Melbury was the first drop of balm in his Excellency’s unwontedly distasteful cup. She pooh-poohed his old-fashioned suggestion that the hostess’s enforced absence necessitated a postponement of her visit—announced her arrival at the prescribed time, and her conviction that she and her cousin would get on "like a house on fire." Such being the great lady’s opinion, the great man was delighted; and, before many further hours had gone by, the younger and less important Aspasia, with hardly suppressed giggles, heard him hold forth at the dinner table to the following effect: "What my wife requires really is absolute country quiet. I have arranged that she should pass her first weeks in England at her own little place in Dorsetshire, a charming old manor-house. She naturally does not wish to see much society till my return; and, anyhow, there is a small piece of work which she is undertaking at my suggestion." Here he whispered audibly to the General—his guest of the evening: "Poor English, you know—a little biography we are getting up about him. He was killed, you remember, in that Baroghil expedition." "Umph, yes; I remember, Inziri Pass—seven years ago, nasty business," grumbled the General, as he guzzled his soup; and Aspasia’s eyes danced and her cheeks grew pink with suppressed laughter. Young Simpson thought she was laughing at him, and became abjectly wretched for the evening. * * * * * Having re-established his supremacy to his own satisfaction, Sir Arthur took an enormous interest in the protocol of his wife’s departure. As he himself intended to accompany her to Bombay—he was to meet Lady Aspasia at an intermediate town on her May north—all the pomp and circumstance in which his soul delighted was to grace the occasion: the escorts, the salutes, the special trains, and so forth. Finding that Major Bethune was bound by the same boat, he annexed him to his "progress," with a condescension peculiarly his own. "He is engaged in some literary work, at my request. A very good kind of fellow; very intelligent, too," he explained. And so Raymond Bethune found himself one of the Lieutenant-Governor’s brilliant retinue that autumn evening of the departure. "A silent, unemotional man," Sir Arthur might have added to his description, had he, in his own sublime content, ever thought of examining the impressions of others.