palpably English tea-rose face not unlike some exquisite Maltese.

They were standing by the rail, watching the sunset city—the Crespins—but Antony was more particularly watching her, his face turned a little towards the deck, and he saw his brother officers, and hailed them.

When he introduced them to “my wife,” Bruce, forgetting it was for her to grant it, if she chose, not for him to ask it, impulsively held out his hand—after all she was one of them now—and Lucilla instantly and cordially gave him hers; and when he let it go, not too quickly, she held it out with a pretty friendly gesture, half girlish, half matronly to Dr. Crossland, and said to them both, “How jolly! I thought I should have to wait until we got to Sumnee before I knew any of you. This is ever so much nicer.” And her big blue eyes, deep and clear as sapphires, but softer under their curled fringe of long dark lashes, said shyly, “Please like me.”

“By Jove, Mrs. Crespin”—she was not very used yet to being called so, and she flushed deliciously, and a dimple trembled at one corner of her bow-shaped red mouth—“By Jove, it is ripping of you to say so,” Bruce stammered delightedly. And Crossland looked what Bruce had said.

They saw without looking the relief in each other’s faces.

Crespin saw it too, and laughed aloud.

“What is it?” Lucilla demanded.

“Ask them,” Antony chuckled, and sauntered off, leaving the three alone.

“What was Tony laughing at?” the girl persisted.

Dr. Crossland smiled sagely, but shook his head decidedly.

“I’ll tell you some day, if I dare, Mrs. Crespin,” Bruce promised her. “Wouldn’t dare tell you now, don’t you know. My hat, I’m glad we’ve hopped on to your boat—no end a tamasha we’ll have getting out to our 306-in-the-shade paradise. I say, don’t you let Crespin give us the slip in Calcutta, will you?”

“Why did he laugh? What was funny? Do tell me.”

But neither man would do that.

But they each fell very industriously to making particularly good friends with Antony Crespin’s wife.

And that night in the stateroom they shared each made a cryptic remark, one to his hair-brush, one to the shoe he kicked off.

“Thank the Lord!” Tom Bruce told his shoe audibly.

George Crossland, under his breath said to his brush, frowning at it, “Poor girl!”

CHAPTER IV

“Shall I like India, Captain Bruce?”

“Sure to—all women do. But you’ll jolly well hate Sumnee. It’s the jumping-off place.”

“Shall I?” Mrs. Crespin repeated, turning a little to Crossland.

“Like India, Mrs. Crespin? Most women do, more than like it. Bruce is right there. But I’m not sure about you.”

“Why?”

“You are different,” he said simply.

“Why shall I dislike Sumnee?” she asked them both.

“Good Lord!” Bruce answered.

“My hat!” Crossland said.

“As bad as all that?” Lucilla said gayly.

“Worse,” they both answered her instantly.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Tony?” Mrs. Crespin asked severely.

“You mightn’t have come,” her husband told her, “and I rather wanted you to.”

Lucilla blushed.

“Don’t mind us,” Bruce said encouragingly.

Dr. Crossland looked out over the water.

But it was to him that she said, “Please tell me about Sumnee.”

“Well,” he began, “it’s hot.”

“Of course,” Lucilla interrupted him scornfully, “it’s India. Even I know that. Even in Surrey we have heard that it is warm in the Punjab.”

“You have heard no lie,” Bruce said stoutly. “Surrey! Good Lord—to be in Surrey when the marrow’s in bloom and the cabbage in fruit, and the starch stands to its collar! Hot! Hot isn’t the word.”

“It is not,” Crespin agreed.

“Is Sumnee so very hot, Dr. Crossland?”

“Scorching!”

“Go on,” she prompted.

“Well—there’s nothing to tell—really there isn’t. There’s nothing to describe, because there’s nothing there. There’s scarcely a tree.”

“I shall make a garden at once, if we haven’t one.”

“You will not,” Bruce murmured.

“Go on, Dr. Crossland. There must be something to tell me.”

“And there isn’t a decent house.”

“But there must be. We don’t live in tents, do we?”

“We live in mud huts,” Bruce said softly, “and live on goat.”

“But roast kid is perfect. Daddy and I particularly like it.”

“In Sumnee it is—imperfect,” Bruce remarked grimly.

But though they railed, Lucilla Crespin caught a warm undercurrent of affection, of pleasant memories and zesty anticipations in the raillery. Every woman owns to liking India greatly; most men pose as disliking it—while they are there; but ask the Anglo-Indian “home now for good,” when you run across him in the Strand, just there at Charing Cross where we all meet each other sooner or later—and he’ll tell you, if he’s English-honest, that he is homesick for India, rains, droughts, natives and all; and watch the face of the long-service Anglo-Indian going home for the last time, going home to inheritance, increased fortune and ease perhaps—watch his face and his eyes as the P. and O. or troop-ship pulls off from Bombay or Madras or down the Hugli, and he takes his long last look at the sweltering East! You will not need to ask him.

They were having afternoon tea on deck, Malta two days behind them—the sun-awnings were up now, and ices were served at eleven and three—and Crespin said as he held his cup up for her to fill it again, “Never mind, Lu, you shall have a garden of sorts, and these blighters shall dig it, while you and I sit under the veranda punkah and eat mango-ices and stone-cold pumelos. You shall have all the comfy home things, every one of them. And perhaps you won’t quite hate poor old rotten Sumnee. I shall like Sumnee now.”

“You, you lucky beggar—of course you will. Who wouldn’t, in your shoes?” Bruce grumbled. “But perhaps we’ll like it better too—now—” he added more cheerfully. “And we’ll teach you how to play parlor polo, and how to make toothsome chupatties out of mud and cocoanut fat, and how to eat mangoes without a bib on, and, if you’ll let us, come to tea every day, and tiffin on Sundays, and dinner quite often, we’ll give you curly daggers and beetle-work lace curtains and bunches of cactus dahlias and crushed torquoise things from the Vale of Kashmir, Lucknow enamels—fish-pattern ones, Bokhara cloths, Poona trays, Benares brass-work, Deccan snakes (tin, not live ones) and peacock-feather fans, thousands and thousands of peacock feathers, painted leather Bikanir vases and glass bangles, and tin toe-rings to make your drawing-room beautiful.”

“But, you mustn’t,” Lucilla Crespin told him firmly. “I intend our home to be absolutely