Out in the veranda, away from the blare of the Viceroy’s band, she told me very delicately and with the most charming ellipses how Armour had been filling her life in Agra, how it had all been, for these two, a dream and a vision. There is a place below the bridge there, where the cattle come down from the waste pastures across the yellow sands to drink and stand in the low water of the Jumna, to stand and switch their tails while their herdsmen on the bank coax them back with ‘Ari!’ ‘Ari!’ ‘Ari!’ long and high, faint and musical; and the minarets of Akbar’s fort rise beyond against the throbbing sky and the sun fills it all. This place I shall never see more distinctly than I saw it that night on the veranda at Government House, Calcutta, with the conviction, like a margin for the picture, that its foreground had been very often occupied by the woman I profoundly worshiped and Ingersoll Armour. She told me that he had sent me a sketch of it, and I very much wished he hadn’t. One felt that the gift would carry a trifle of irony. ‘He has told me,’ she said once brusquely, ‘how good you have been to him.’ ‘Is he coming to Simla again?’ I asked. ‘Oh yes! And please take it from me that this time he will conquer the place. He has undertaken to do it.’ ‘At your request?’ ‘At my persuasion--at my long entreaty. They must recognize him--they must be taught. I have set my heart on it.’ ‘Does he himself very much care?’ I asked remembering the night of the thirty-first of October. ‘Yes, he does care. He despises it, of course, but in a way he cares. I’ve been trying to make him care more. A human being isn’t an orchid; he must draw something from the soil he grows in.’ ‘If he were stable,’ I mused; ‘if he had a fixed ambition somewhere in the firmament. But his purpose is a will-o’-the-wisp.’ ‘I think he has an ambition,’ said Miss Harris, into the dark. ‘Ah! Then we must continue,’ I said--‘continue to push from behind.’ Dora did not reply. She is a person of energy and determination, and might have been expected to offer to cooperate gladly. But she didn’t. ‘He is painting a large picture for next season’s exhibition,’ she informed me. ‘I was not allowed to see it or to know anything about it, but he declares it will bring Simla down.’ ‘I hope not,’ I said, piously. ‘Oh, I hope so. I have told him,’ Dora continued, slowly, ‘that a great deal depends on it.’ ‘Here is Mrs. Symons,’ I was able to return, ‘and I am afraid she is looking for you.’