"Good!--We'll get up a native dinner at the Palace in honour of the occasion. My little girl has set her heart on the plan, rather to my wife's dismay. The Maurices want to come too; and we may have to include Garth, on her account; though I confess I wanted her for myself! She's worth talking to, that girl. There's a touch of genius in her composition, and a touch of the folly that's apt to go along with it; or she would never give the gossips a chance to couple her name with Garth's. If he is in earnest, so much the worse for her.--We may count on you, Lenox, I hope?" he added, turning to the impassive man at his side, whom he had unwittingly smitten between the joints of his harness. Lenox's muttered assent was a trifle indistinct, owing to the thick pipe-stem between his teeth, and rising deliberately, he passed out of the smoking-room into the wistaria-shadowed verandah, where the turbulent voice of the river seemed to echo his own mood. It was well for himself, and for James Garth also, that he ran no risk of meeting the man at that moment. The thought of that first fortnight in June unnerved him. For Colonel Mayhew's words had done more than turn the knife in an open wound. Lenox was blest, or curst, with that most pitiless of mentors, a Scotch conscience. Whatever Quita's failings, or her attitude to himself, there could be no shelving the fact that he was her husband:--the guardian of her good name, the one man on earth who could claim the right to criticise her conduct. Her probable repudiation both of his criticism, and his right to offer it, did not, in his view, justify him in standing aloof, if need for speech should arise. Possibly passion, smouldering at the heart of duty, urged him towards the desperate experiment. But if so, he would not admit it, even to himself. He merely decided--with an access of fastidious disgust at the whole situation--to accept this fate-sent opportunity for judging how far her behaviour warranted Colonel Mayhew's kindly concern. For he knew enough of Garth and his methods to feel certain that, in his case, to covet an invitation was to procure it. After all, he reflected bitterly, a closer acquaintance with facts might cure him of an infatuation against which pride and inherited instinct had rebelled ill vain: and so intricate are the mazes of self-deception, that he firmly believed in his own desire to be cured.