In vision he placed the two men before him: Harry, stern, eager, true, with his rare beautiful smile—eagle of glance, clear of mind, unerring of judgment, swift of action; Harry English, the unrecognised hero of the deep strong heart; he whose courage at the crucial moment had maintained the honour of England; who, in saving the frontier stronghold, had, as Bethune knew, saved India from gathering disaster! And Sir Arthur Gerardine, the great man, with his fatuous smile, his fatal self-complacency, his ignorant policy. Sir Arthur Gerardine, in his high place, working untold future mischief to the Empire with inane diligence. Bethune almost laughed, as he pictured the Lieutenant-Governor to himself, one of the many of his order, busy in picking out stone by stone the great foundations planned by the brains of Lawrences, cemented by the blood of Nicholsons. And yet, this Rosamond Gerardine, who had borne the name of English, could not be dismissed merely as one who, light-natured, had found it easy and profitable to forget. Sphinx, she had haunted his thoughts that Indian night as he had walked back from her palace, carrying with him her image, white and stately in the flash of her diamonds and the green fires of her emeralds ... the great lady, who knew the value of her smiles and gave the largess but with condescension. Sphinx she was even more to him now, whether hurrying from her walk to receive him, wide-eyed in the firelight, with the bloom of a girl on her cheek and an exquisite gracious timidity; or wan in her black robes—widow, indeed, it seemed—drinking in with speechless tenderness of sorrow every memory of the lost friend, as if no Sir Arthur Gerardine had ever stepped between her and her beloved. Was this attitude but a phase of a sick woman’s fancy, to be dropped when the mood had passed? Was not, in truth, Lady Gerardine in this freakish humour as false to Sir Arthur, who had given her affluence and position, as she had been to him who had given her his love and faith? Deep down under his consciousness there was a little angry grudge against her that she should not have accompanied them this morning. Were she now sincere, she would have felt the same desire as he himself to pray where the walls heralded Harry English’s name. Bethune did not know, so little do even the most straightforward know themselves, that had she knelt by his side to-day it would have been perilously sweet to him: that had her footsteps gone with his along the frosted roads between the brown hedges, that way, to him, would have remained in fragrance as with a memory of flowers.