But none of the guests troubled themselves about these details. The sky was blue as blue could be, the grey bloom on the spreading deodar branches glinted white in the strong light, the shadows beneath them showed black. Across the valley, contours of terraced crops round a cluster of apricot-trees marked the village sites. Blue air lay between you and them, blue air between them and the snows, blue air gave a thousand iridescent tints to the plains rolling up into the southern sky beyond the dotted ridge of Simla. And below you, drifting up the valleys like grazing sheep, were little fleecy mist-clouds, inconsequent, hopelessly astray. 'Poor things! How lost they look!' said Gwen gaily, pointing at them with her white lace parasol. 'A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind,' quoted one of her circle. 'Mrs. Boynton knows what it is for a heavenly being to be condemned to earth.' 'That sounds prettier than it is. An angel astray! Lewis! defend me from my friends!' She turned to him with the prettiest air of appeal, the sweetest confidence in a regard, which to the outside world was cousinly, to these two something more. Such a bait seldom fails to rouse a man's vanity, even if it leaves his heart untouched. 'My dear Gwen,' he replied readily, 'there is no need for defence. The angel is not astray since you are here with us, and we are in Paradise.' George Keene applauded with both hands as he sat at her feet looking out over the plains. Once more it seemed incredible that there should be such a place on God's earth as Hodinuggur. 'Well, some of us will be sitting at the gate thereof disconsolate ere long,' remarked a man leaning against a rock, with a cup of black coffee and a cigarette. 'By the way, Keene, we might share a tonga the day after tomorrow.' 'Mr. Keene is not going,' interrupted Mrs. Boynton quickly. 'No one wants him down there, and we need dancing men dreadfully. Miss Tweedie had spoken to her father about it?' 'And you?' The question, which came almost in a whisper, was answered by a smile only; but it brought a sort of mist to George Keene's young eyes as he looked out over the plains again. The spiritual exaltation of it all was almost too much at times for the hard-headed young fellow who had clothed his own honest uprightness with a woman's softness and sweetness, in order to worship it.