Colonel Carmichael shook his head. He was overwhelmed by a cross-current of conflicting emotions to which he could give no name. "True or not true, your--eh--statement has got us into a pretty mess, Miss Cary," he said. "You have played with fire. Pray Heaven that it has not set light to Marut!" She turned and looked at him. In that pale face upon which had sunk the light of a sudden peace the Colonel read something which sent his blunt instinct searching wildly for a solution. "I did what I had to do, Colonel Carmichael," she said. "Come, mother, we must go home." CHAPTER III A FAREWELL John Stafford sat at his table by the open door which looked on to the garden. The room behind him was bare of all graceful or even tasteful ornament--a few native weapons, captured probably during small frontier wars, hung on the wall, but nothing else relieved its blank, whitewashed monotony. The one photograph of his father which had once been fastened above the mantelpiece had been taken down months before and the hole made by the nail carefully and methodically filled and painted over. The room typified the man in its painful order, its painful whitewashed cleanliness, its rigid plainness. But the garden was the symbol of the hidden possibility in him, the corner of warm, impulsive feeling which the world had never seen. The roses grew up to the very steps of the verandah; they had been trained to clamber over the trellis-work as though seeking to gain entrance to his room; they spread themselves in rich, glowing variety over the little patch of ground, and one of their number, the most lovely and fullest blown, hung her heavy head in splendid isolation from the vase upon his table. He looked at the rose and he looked at the garden, on which lay the first clear rays of the rising sun. In him stirred a rare wistfulness, a rare melancholy. For to him all the gentler, softer forms of sorrow were rare. In the last year he had suffered, but in his own way--rigidly, coldly, unbendingly. His lips, even in the loneliness of his own room, had always been tight closed over the smothered exclamation of pain. He had gone on steadily and conscientiously with his work. He had never for one moment "given way to himself," as he expressed it. But this morning he was in the power of that strange "atmosphere"--call it what you will--which we feel when still only half awake, and which, independent of all outward circumstances, destines our day's mood of cheerfulness or depression. Strangely enough, he had made no struggle against it--he had yielded to it with a sense of inevitableness.