Perhaps the mother whom she worshipped and to whom she had devotedly sacrificed the last four years of her young life was the inspiration of her revolt. For her mother had been a highly bred woman, of a proud old Anglo-Indian family, all Generals and Colonels and Sirs and Ladies, whose names had been involved in the history of British India for generations; and when she threw the Anglo-Indian family halo over the windmills and married young Stephen Gale, who used to stand in the market-place of Medlow and bawl out the bidding for pigs and sheep, the family turned her down with the Anglo-Indian thoroughness that had compelled her mother to lose her life in a plague-stricken district and her father to lose his on the North-West Frontier. The family argument was simple. When you—or everything mattering that means you—have ruled provinces and commanded armies and been Sahibs from the beginning of Anglo-Indian time, you can’t go and marry a man who sells pigs at auction, and remain alive. None of the family deigned to gauge the personal value of the pig-seller. The Anglo-Brahmin lost caste. It is true that, afterwards, patronizing efforts were made by Brahminical uncles and aunts and cousins to bridge over the impassable gulf; but Mrs. Gale, very much in love with her pig-selling husband, snapped her fingers at them and told them, in individually opposite terms, to go hang. It was a love match right enough. And a love match it remained to the very end of all things; after she had borne him two sons and a daughter; all through the young lives of the children; up to the day when the telegram came announcing the death of their elder son—the younger had been killed in the curious world accident a month or so before—and Stephen Gale stood by her bedside—she had even then succumbed to her incurable malady—and said, shaken with an emotion to which one does not refer nowadays: “Mary, my dear, what am I to do?” And she, the blood in her speaking—the blood that had given itself at Agra, Lucknow, Khandahar, Chitral—replied: “Go, dear.” Olivia, sitting by, gripped her young hands in mingled horror and grief and passionate wonder. And Stephen Gale, just fifty, went out to avenge his sons and do what was right in his wife’s eyes—for his wife was his country incarnate, her voice, being England’s voice. A love match it was and a love match it remained while he stuck it for two or three years—an elderly man at an inglorious Base, until he died of pneumonia—over there.