The evening ended peacefully after the events and storms of the day, each feeling that they had a better understanding of each other, and yet each acknowledging that they still had much more to learn than they had expected. But that night, long after Nouna, tired out, had gone happily and peacefully to sleep in his arms, George lay awake, and acknowledged mournfully to himself that he had made a bad beginning. He had shown want of self-control over the diamonds and Rahas’s visit, he had shown weakness in letting Sundran stay, and he recognised vividly that the dignity of husband required a very long list of qualities for the proper maintenance of the character. A little more conduct like that of to-day, and the young wife to whom he ought to be as a sun-god, a model of what was right and noble, would begin to despise him, and all would be over. They would sink at once to the level of the ordinary cavilling, cooing young couple whom every new-made husband so heartily contemns. George fell asleep resolved to inaugurate a new _régime_ of immaculate firmness and forbearance in the morning. But how could he have reckoned upon the irresistible charm of a waking woman, fresh after the night’s sleep as an opening rose, all smiles, blushes, babbling girlish confidences, sweet reticences, a creature a thousand times more bewitching, more beautiful, than in his hottest young man’s dreams he had ever imagined a mortal could be? Her loveliness dazzled, intoxicated him; spaces of time which a week before were called hours passed like brief seconds in her society. He tore himself from her side too late: for the first time he was late for parade. On the following morning it was Nouna herself who hurried him off, and he was charmed with this dutiful wifeliness until he was suddenly startled out of all attention to an order from his superior officer by the appearance of his wife, in a white dress and the baby-bonnet he had bought for her, on the parade-ground. As for the Colonel, the unexpected apparition of this extraordinary little figure had an almost ghastly effect upon him. George saw him glaring at the poor child as if her white drapery had been the flimsy garment of an authentic ghost. “Who brought that girl here? Tell her she has no business on the parade-ground,” said Lord Florencecourt in an almost brutal tone. Much incensed, George rode forward with a crimson face, and saluting, said: “Colonel, that lady is my wife.” He did not notice the rapid movement of curiosity and excitement which his announcement made among such of the other officers as stood near. They had all looked at the girl’s pretty face with surprise and admiration, but the information that she was the wife of a comrade produced upon them much the same effect that the discovery of a fox in an animal they had taken for a rabbit would have on a group of hunting-men.