The Native Born | Page 8

his search went no farther than her flushed, eager face. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "I have found the enchantress herself! Miss----" He hesitated, for an instant unaccountably shaken out of his debonair self-possession. Webb sprang to the rescue with a formal introduction, and Travers proceeded, if not entirely with his old equanimity. "I beg your pardon, Miss Cary," he apologized. "Your face is, strangely enough, so familiar to me that I took you for an old acquaintance--perhaps, indeed, you are, if in our modern days Circe finds it necessary to travel incognito."
Beatrice joined in the general amusement, her unusually large and beautiful eyes bright with elation.
"May I claim your assistance?" Travers went on. "Instinct tells me that we shall be irresistible."
"Willingly," Beatrice responded, "though I can not imagine how I can help you."
"Leave that to me," he said, offering her his arm. "My plans are Napoleonic in their depth and magnitude. If you will allow me to unfold them to you before the dancing begins--?"
She smiled her assent, and walked at his side toward the Colonel's bungalow. On their way they passed Mrs. Cary, who, strangely enough, did not respond to the half-triumphant glance which her daughter cast at her. She turned hastily aside.
"Mr. Travers is no doubt--" she began, in a confidential undertone; but her companion, Mrs. Carmichael, had taken the opportunity and vanished.
The light-hearted, superficial discussion, with its scarcely felt undercurrent of tragic reminiscence, had lasted through the swift sunset, and already dusk was beginning to throw its long shadows over the gaily dressed figures that streamed up toward the bungalow.
On the outskirts of the garden lights were springing up in quick succession, thanks to the industry of Mrs. Carmichael, who hurried from one Chinese lantern to the other, breathless but determined. The task was doubtless an ignominious one for an Anglo-Indian lady of position, but Mrs. Carmichael, who acted as a sort of counterbalance to her husband's extravagant hospitality, cared not at all. England, half-pay and all its attendant horrors, loomed in the near future, and economy had to be practised somehow.
Of the late group only Lois and John Stafford remained. They had not spoken, but, as though obeying a mutual understanding, both remained quietly waiting till they were alone.
"Shall we walk about a little?" he asked at last. "I missed our morning ride so much. It has put my whole day out of joint, and I want something to put it straight again. Do you mind, or would you rather dance? I see they have begun."
"No," she said. "I would rather be quiet for a few minutes. Somehow I have lost the taste for that sort of thing to-night."
"I also," he responded.
They walked silently side by side along the well-kept path, each immersed in his own thoughts and soothed by the knowledge that their friendship had reached a height where silence is permitted--becomes even the purest form of expression. At the bottom of the compound they reached a large, low-built building, evidently once a dwelling-place, overgrown with wild plants and half in ruins, whose dim outlines stood out against the darkening background of trees and sky. The door stood open, and must indeed have stood open for many years, for the broken hinges were rusty and seemed to be clinging to the torn woodwork only by the strength of undisturbed custom.
Stafford came to a halt.
"That is where--" he began, and then abruptly left his sentence unfinished.
"Yes," she said, "it is here. I don't think, as long as we live in India, that my guardian will ever have it touched. He calls it the Memorial. My father was his greatest friend, and the terrible fact that he came too late to save him has saddened his whole life."
Stafford looked down at her. The light from a lantern which Mrs. Carmichael, with great dexterity, had fixed among some overhanging branches, fell on the dark features, now composed and thoughtful. She met his glance in silence, with large eyes that had taken into their depths something of the surrounding shadow. He had never felt so strongly before the peculiarity of her fascination--perhaps because he had never seen her in a setting which seemed so entirely a part of herself. The distant music, the hum of voices, and that strange charm which permeates an Indian nightfall--above all, the ruined bungalow with its shattered door and silent memories--these things, with their sharp contrasts of laughter and tragedy, had formed themselves into a background which belonged to her, so that she and they seemed inseparable.
"Oh, Lois, little girl!" Stafford said gently. "I have always thought of you as standing alone, different from everything and everybody, a stranger from another world, irresistible, incomprehensible. I have just understood that you are part and parcel of it all, child of the sun and flowers and mysteries