she stood there greeting the hundredth guest with undiminished vivacity and turning her graceful head every now and then with a quick movement in the direction of her husband's voice that rolled up over the murmur of talk in big waves of jollity.

And to these two had come Imogen Daunt; Moggie as Susan called her; Moggie, with her fatal power over men and her healthy, unimaginative mind and her untouched heart; and lastly, Moggie possessed by her Idea.

There she was, towering in the centre of that circle, swaying a little with that Andalusian movement of the hips, looking at them all through those absurdly insolent eyes. As he watched her, he laughed, for with all her length of limb and breadth of shoulder and weight of hair, she was funny. She was Imogen Daunt, the famous socialist, the leader of the woman's movement, and yet she was just Moggie. And he shouted to himself, " Of course, of course!" It was preposterous and absurd, but it was true. He knew her. He had seen her do it before, on the Terrace of the House of Commons, from the balcony of a New York Hotel. In one instant she had become the

centre of everyone's interest, suddenly and irrationally and, on her part, he could have sworn, innocently. And now she would do, what she always did, hold up the progress of the earth and bid it revolve in the opposite direction, and by virtue of what? Ah! that was to him the miraculous joke-by virtue of nothing but her magnificent person. In an ecstasy of recognition he hugged himself, craning his neck above the screen of foliage. And then suddenly, with his still increasing vision of all those white and bronze faces, those muslin dresses and those brilliant turbans, he saw the future and its complications and it made him gasp. She was the same, his huge inspired child, possessed by her Idea, her great and single Idea.

The Idea was harmless enough perhaps in itself. He could imagine it battering for centuries on the walls of unheeding zenanas, wandering forever among the endless sunlit silences of Indian fields, but, wielded by her gigantic charm, it was terribly potent. And with her infallible luck she had chosen the precise time and place at which to appear in order to make the greatest possible sensation.

The whole station was there, and beside the

complete official world of white men, enough Indians to represent that highly educated community who were beginning to arrogate to themselves the powers and responsibilities of their own destiny. Directly opposite was Badri Nath, the editor of the Hindustan, a big square man, in a frock coat and white turban. Planted heavily, the toes of his shining boots turned widely outward, he stared before him with an expressionless countenance through a pair of smoked glasses that hid his ponderous soul from the world. Never had Badri Nath been seen without those dark spectacles and never had he been known to smile. The graces of social intercourse he left entirely to his wife. She stood beside him, the dark oval of her proud and perfect face framed in a purple veil, that swept up over her ample bosom and across the crown of her head. She wore few jewels, merely a gold bangle or two on her beautifully moulded arms; but the little scarlet disc, stamped upon her forehead, gave her, in spite of the perfection of her attire, and the brilliance of her smile, a barbaric, cruel look. Mrs Badri Nath was the most progressive Indian woman in the Punjab. She had spent some years travelling with her

husband, and before her marriage had taken a B.A. at Calcutta, and her Indian sisters looked upon her somewhat askance. Beyond this striking couple, Kashi Ram Choula the ascetic, the prodigal son of the Brahmo-samaj, returned to practise medicine after ten years in Great Britain, stood talking to Bobbie Concannon, the canal-man. Kashi Ram and Concannon were friends. Whenever Concannon was in the station they were to be seen together, the tall morose Indian, with his narrow dark face, and the sun-burned, blue-eyed engineer, one of the most popular men in his service. Kashi Ram seemed to have a fascination for youngsters out from home. Annandale himself had seen them in the Indian's miserable room off the bazaar, a whole group of them, had known them spend half the night there, smoking and listening to their host talk of India, India in the days when Aurungzeb persecuted the Sikhs at Delhi. Kashi Ram, besides being a very clever doctor was a historical genius. He was mad too, quite mad, but his strident rather nasal voice and gleaming eyes and the sneering, blistering vividness of his expressions, had returned to Annandale more than once on his pilgrimages

to ruined cities. Kashi Ram appealed to the professional man in Annandale, to the architect. He was a kind of human symbol of the fiercely mystic, reality-obliterating art of the Hindu ; full of incongruities, overburdened with detailed imagery and yet intent on the abstract, the final, the absolute. And all this, his visionary temperament, his orgies of talk and his riots of fancy, seemed to have a weird fascination for youths whose imaginations were suffocated with hard work, whose mouths were muzzled by responsibility. There was, too, just that streak of poetry in Bobbie Concannon that could appreciate the picturesqueness of Kashi Ram's self-sacrifice.

Well, then, here they all were, with Imogen Daunt in the midst of them.

But Annandale's exhilaration was gone in a moment, for when the two women caught sight of one another and swept together, he got a full view of the man accompanying Imogen, and on the instant of recognition received an impression so sinister that he leaped over the flower pots and descended hurriedly into the arena. Susan and Moggie had released one another and were standing in a