To know a character rightly it should be seen in its natural element; and the Lenox of the Himalayas was by no means the same man as the Lenox of the Plains. All his latent energy and vigour blossomed out like flowers at the first whisper of spring. 'The glory of Himachal' drew and penetrated and inspired him like nothing else on earth. Here he tracked and brought down oonyal, markhor, and the great mountain sheep; explored on a small scale, because the fever of going was upon him; and slept as a man only sleeps when he is living close to the heart of Nature. Here, also,--fortified by solitude, by the uplifting sense of things awful and divine which is the gift of great mountains to those who love them,--he fought doggedly and systematically against a craving that persisted in spite of improved health. For the tyranny of opium is as tenacious as it is deadly; and the habit of five years is not to be broken in as many weeks. But the man who wills to conquer evil has God and Nature fighting on his side: and in the teeth of several flagrant lapses, Lenox made steady progress. In Srinagar he bought a bottle of chlorodyne; and two days later flung it down the _khud_. When his store of drugged tobacco ran out, he replaced it by a brand in which an innocuous admixture of opium just sufficed to produce the faint fragrance that he loved. The black fits of melancholy, which were native to his temperament, and which, in the past five years, had threatened to dominate him permanently, evaporated like morning fogs before the sun as the certainty grew in him that he must prevail: and Quita, who had done most of the harm, made unconscious reparation by letters whose consummate faith in the final issue was stimulating as the mountain air itself. By October he was back at Dera Ishmael Khan;--a renewed man, bronzed and vigorous, the shadow gone from his eyes; testing his achievement and finding that it held good; bending all his energies to the task of fitting up a home for his wife; a task whereof Honor usurped as large a share as he would permit. Then, towards the end of the month, he wrote to Quita: "Come. We are ready, and waiting for you,--the house, Zyarulla, Brutus, and your impatient husband, who will pick you up at Lahore." And on the last day of October, more than six years after their hasty wedding, Eldred and Quita Lenox entered upon their married life. "Have you forgotten, darling, the nonsense I talked that day about the House, and the Enchanted Palace?" she asked, as they stood together on their first evening in the drawing-room, whose every detail he had planned with elaborate care. "Is it likely? Why?" His arm was round her shoulders; and putting up one hand she touched his face. "Why . . because I said we would have to begin with the House. But we seem to have reached the Enchanted Palace before starting after all?" "By a very roundabout route," he answered, a suspicion of the old sadness in his eyes.