"My dear generous little woman!" He bent over her and kissed her, apparently unconscious that she instinctively drew back from his caress. "If you really will help me, no doubt I shall build things up again in no time, and this one blunder won't count for much. You are a worthy comrade for a man." Perhaps he had accepted her offer too quickly, perhaps his tone jarred on her as too elated, too satisfied. She got up, pushing her letters quickly to one side. "You really wish us to start for Madras to-night?" "Yes, if you can manage it. It is important that I should get back as soon as possible, and the business here is finished." "Very well. I will pack up as much as I can. The rest must be sent on afterward." He let her reach the door before he stopped her again. "By the way, Lois, there is one thing I must ask you. I do not wish you to have any further intercourse with that Beatrice Cary. She is not a person with whom I should wish my wife to associate. You were right about her--she is a bad, unscrupulous woman." With her hand on the curtain she turned and looked back at him. A cloud of curious distrust passed over her pale face. "I never said that she was bad or unscrupulous. I do not believe that she is. You say that now, but it was not your old opinion." "I suppose it is possible to see people in different and less agreeable lights?" he retorted sharply. "Only too possible. But as she was never a friend of mine, and we are leaving within the next few hours, the injunction to avoid her is unnecessary." She paused as though listening. "I hear some one talking to the syce," she went on hurriedly. "It sounds like Captain Stafford's voice. Archibald"--she turned and came quickly to his side--"please let me out of the verandah. I don't want to meet him." He caught her by the wrist and pushed her back. The movement was brutal, unlike his usual gentleness, and she saw by the expression of his face that for the moment he had lost all consciousness of what he was doing. "I don't want to see him either. Go and tell him that I am not at home--that I have started for Madras--quick! Don't stand there staring." His extraordinary excitement, apparently unreasonable and entirely opposed to his calm, easy-going habits, had the effect of setting fire to her dormant suspicion. She wrenched herself free. "I am not going to tell him a lie," she said firmly. "Lois, you are a little fool! Do as I tell you. It isn't a lie--only a piece of conventional humbug which everybody understands. There, please!" His tone of entreaty was more disagreeable to her than his roughness. All the pride and rigidity of her Puritan temperament was up in arms against the indefinable something which it had long ago recognized and despised. "It is not conventional humbug," she retorted--"not in this case. You are lying because you are afraid, because you have a reason for not seeing Captain Stafford which you won't tell me."