Probably Coventry was happier just now than he had yet been during his lifetime. He had always known, he assured himself, that, once the first excitement of her new existence had subsided, Trixie would settle down; that it could only be a matter of time for her to realise the responsibilities of a married woman's life; which self-assurance was not exactly genuine. But when doubt has safely turned to confidence, many of us are apt to forget that doubt has ever troubled us at all. However, at last Trixie seemed to have entered upon a stage of domesticity, just as whole-heartedly as she had thrown herself at first into gaieties and social distractions. She became wildly enthusiastic over her housekeeping, and tried her own and her husband's digestions severely by her daring experiments in cookery. She started a farmyard, and was triumphant concerning eggs and poultry, while George was driven silently distracted by the piercing and persistent clack of guinea-fowls. She spent contented hours at her
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piano and over her home mail, which, until lately, she had rather neglected. And she did not complain of the increasing heat, nor of the compulsory imprisonment indoors during the long days. She had plenty of resources within herself, and her high spirits never flagged. Any idea of going to the hills apparently had not occurred to her, and Coventry, whose theory was that as long as she kept her health a wife's place was with her husband, prudently did not suggest it. Not that he would have actually distrusted her away from him, but his peace of mind must have suffered acutely, knowing that she was making friendships and joining in amusements that he could not supervise; for undoubtedly Trixie would enjoy herself without reflection wherever she might be, and then there was always the fear of people talking, which held a kind of nightmare niche in his imagination.
It was just at this peaceful period that an invitation came for him to join the camp of a well-known sportsman on a tiger-shooting expedition, an opportunity that no man, however uxorious a husband--and especially a man like Coventry, with whom sport had always been a passion--could easily resist without regret. And yet he hesitated. He could not honestly feel that he did not want to go, and yet he could have wished that Markham had not remembered him, had not thought of
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giving him this tempting chance, or that the letter had miscarried on the way and never reached him.
When he opened the letter he and Trixie were seated at their early breakfast in the veranda, attended by a greedy and devoted gathering of pets. Two well-disciplined fox terriers watched in quivering impatience for scraps of toast, obediently oblivious of a pair of Persian kittens that clawed and mewed and sprang in unmannerly fashion; a noisy green parrot in a dome-shaped cage; a monkey that jumped and jabbered on the back of the memsahib's chair; a tame squirrel that darted to and fro with bead-like eyes and feathery tail, even a greater trial to the dogs than the Persian kittens. Trixie worshipped animals and children; indeed, she had one day scandalised the general's wife by declaring, most immodestly as that lady considered, that she intended to have twenty babies, but, meanwhile, she could content herself with dogs and cats and monkeys.
Coventry threw the letter across the table to his wife; he half hoped she would read it with dismay, and show reluctance that he should accept the invitation. This, he felt, would give him just the excuse he wanted to refuse it, would put a definite obstacle in the way of acceptance instead of his being left at the mercy of conflicting inclinations.
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He watched her read the letter, but her expression did not cloud; on the contrary, it brightened.
"Oh, George!" she cried, looking up at him with shining eyes, "how lovely for you, and how I wish I could come too! I'd give anything to ride an elephant all day, and see tigers charge, and hear them roar, and then wear a necklace of their claws!"
"Markham won't have women on his shoots. He says it degrades the sport to the level of garden party games!" said Coventry.
"Oh, what a pig he must be!"
"Anyway, it would be far too rough for you, and the heat would be awful in tents. I'm not at all sure that I like the idea of it myself."
"You surely can't mean that you are dreaming of refusing?" cried Trixie, in amazed reproach. "Of course, you must go. He asks you to wire, so you must answer at once. Shall I get a telegraph form?"
"I'm not particularly keen on going," he said, with affected carelessness.
"I don't believe it! I am sure you are aching to wire and say you are coming. If you are pretending that you don't want to go because you think I shall be lonely, you can put that out of your head at once. I shan't miss you a bit."
She in her turn was acting the hypocrite. In
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reality her heart had sunk a little as she read the letter. She knew she should miss George very much, that she would feel lonely, dull, and rather helpless without him, and she suddenly recognised that she leaned on him mentally a good deal more than she had been aware of hitherto. Also that his interest in and sympathy with all her little schemes and undertakings had meant much to her. Secretly she had been surprised at her own acceptance of the daily monotony and lack of excitements, and wondered vaguely why she was not bored; and now the knowledge came to her with almost startling effect that it was because of George's constant presence. She looked at him with new attention--he was in uniform, for he had just returned from early parade--and a little glow of pride in his appearance kindled in her heart. Certainly she had a very handsome husband, and, moreover, he was kind and good and faithful, even if his ideas of propriety were somewhat tedious and old-maidish, and he was inclined to be jealous and over-particular. After all, he knew the world; his experience had been long and wide, and he had no great reason to trust either men or women. Trixie seldom thought of the first Mrs. Coventry. The old story had not troubled her; hardly had she regarded it as real. The whole of George's past life was more or less unreal to her, for the reason,
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perhaps, that he had never spoken of more than casual happenings, or small reminiscences connected with his mother, now dead, and his sister, who had taken up missionary work in the slums of London.
In addition, Trixie was a person who contemplated the present and the immediate future to the exclusion of retrospection, partly because she was so young and had all her life before her, and again because it was her nature. She neither looked back nor far forward. Yet now a glimmering of what her husband might have suffered in the past disturbed her self-engrossment, and caused her to feel inadequate and humble, possessed with a helpless regret that drove her to an unselfish desire to conceal her own feelings over this question of his absence. Her apparent anxiety that he should accept Mr. Markham's invitation was construed by Coventry to mean that she was more or less unaffected by the prospect of his absence, and, half hurt and half resentful, he said a little captiously:
"Well, if you want to get rid of me, of course I'll go."
"You know very well you are dying to go," answered Trixie, with good humour; "and it will do you good. All these years at home you've only been able to shoot pheasants and rabbits
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and little birds; and what are they compared with tigers?"
"It's much more difficult to shoot a snipe than a tiger," argued Coventry perversely.
"All the better. You'll be able to bring me back several dozen skins, and heaps of claws, and plenty of those funny little bones that make into brooches and are supposed to bring such good luck."
"How did you know about the bones?" he asked, rather to delay the making of a decision at the moment than because he wished to hear.
"Mother has one--not that it ever brought her any luck, poor dear, unless it was getting me married; and I suppose Gommie, at any rate, would call that good luck! Guy Greaves told me about the bones, too, and he's going to give me one when he shoots his first tiger. He was to have come back yesterday, wasn't he? Was he on parade this morning?"
"Yes," said Coventry.
The sudden mention at this juncture of young Greaves made Coventry's heart contract with a spasm of jealous apprehension.
"I hope," he said, with injudicious haste, "that, if I do go on this shoot, you won't let that boy hang round the bungalow and follow you about all over the place while I am away."
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 Trixie flushed. "So that is why you hesitated about going?" she asked him ominously. "Perhaps you would like me to say 'Not at home' to visitors and refuse every invitation while you are not here?"............