For a moment they looked at each other. The man's eyes were cold and contemptuous, and the woman's sense of injury and injustice increased till she felt wellnigh desperate. To think that she should have been dragged home like a naughty little girl from a party, who must be sent to bed as a punishment, while everyone else was still dancing and enjoying the ball!--and Mr. Kennard would have found another partner whose husband was not a monster of unreasonable jealousy. Perhaps he would smile and shrug his shoulders, and cease now to send her violets every morning, and no longer single her out for special attention, or send her little notes asking what were her plans for the afternoon--or give her books with quotations inscribed by himself on the flyleaf: quotations conveying a harmless though flattering homage. In short, all the little inarticulate attentions that to the initiated are but the preliminaries to a game that need be no more than an emotional pastime, but may be fraught with peril to the flattered novitiate. Instinctively her hand rested on a small, beautifully bound volume that had come this morning with the violets she wore, whose perfume stirred her senses even at this moment as it floated out into the room. On the title page was traced in Kennard's peculiar writing: "A book of verses underneath the bough, A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and _thou_ Beside me, singing in the wilderness-- Oh! wilderness were paradise enow." "Aren't you going to explain?" she demanded in a stifled voice. "You have made me the laughing-stock of the station. You have spoilt my evening. Do you expect me to submit without a word? I am not a child, let me tell you; I am capable of taking care of myself." "Apparently that is just what you are not capable of doing," said Coventry. "Unless you promise me to behave decently in future, and unless you do so, I shall send you home to your father until my time is up in India."