The Durbar had been announced only a few hours previous to Terrington's return, but Rose Chantry had had the news of it from her husband on the previous evening.  
Consequently, when Nevile, so long before he was expected, entered the ante-room, she was quite at home with her triumph and only surprised by the chance of thrusting it into his face.
 
When, half ashamed of having harried such a hungry man, she had flown into the mess-room to find food for him, Terrington sat staring at the white chunam walls, softly aglow with the sunlight that blazed outside. A window in one of them framed a space of blue sky, the greenness of a chenar, and, squatted on the ground beneath it, Rose Chantry's ayah, swinging a glass bead tied to the lowest bough. He was too tired to think of the news he had heard, or to keep his thoughts from following the woman who had told it. He realized with a numb surprise how many memories of her remained in the queer glimmer of that empty room. How much he remembered which he thought to have forgotten, and which, he was not too tired to tell himself, he ought to have forgotten.
 
Whichever way he looked he could see her figure in one of its airy poses, coquettishly sweet or coquettishly defiant; smiling, pouting, mocking, or fancifully grave. The other figures in those groups, men all of them, had faded; hers remained. A white spirit that filled the place for him.
 
He shut his eyes to shut it out; but found the likeness was on the other side of his lids.
 
He lifted them quickly at a laugh from the mess-room doorway through which Rose Chantry was leaning, with a tatty in either hand pressed against her shoulders and her golden head in the gap.
 
"Didn't mean to wake you," she said, smiling, "but there's some cold chikor. Will that do?"
 
"Nothing better," he replied.
 
"Well, you'd better have it where you are," she announced with a glance across her shoulder; "they're hanging a new ceiling cloth in here, and there's no end of a litter."
 
As her head withdrew with a shrill call to the kitmatgah, Sir Colvin and Chantry entered from the verandah.
 
The Commissioner, with the sense of nakedness which men have felt so often since the days of Eve from following a woman's counsel, wished, on learning of Terrington's arrival, to confront him personally with the news of the Durbar. So after he had seated himself and listened to what could be told him on the prospects of supply, he put the question with an exaggerated imitation of his own bluffness.
 
"Well! I suppose you've heard of the Durbar?"
 
"I'm afraid, sir," said the other, "I've been too hungry to hear of anything but breakfast. It's to be cold chikor," he added, smiling, as Rose Chantry, followed by the kitmatgah, made a muslin whiteness in the mess room-door.
 
She heard the cheerful lie with a flash of admiration for the man who spoke it.
 
So many beaten men, she knew, would have jumped at the peevish chance to hit back, especially when the hard truth to hit with was in their hands.
 
"Well," continued Sir Colvin, saluting Mrs. Chantry and reseating himself, as the tray was laid before Terrington, "I decided, as no reply came to my last demand, some sort of move must be made at once, if we weren't to be boxed here all the winter. So, as there was no chance of ferreting the Khan out of that hole of his, we're going to talk him into reason over there."
 
Terrington, with his knife in the partridge, looked up and nodded.
 
"I suppose the plan's no more to your mind than ever?" queried the Commissioner.
 
"No, sir," said his military adviser. "I think it's even less."
 
"How! from what you've heard?" exclaimed Sir Colvin.
 
"No," said the soldier slowly; "from what I haven't heard. There's no talk in the hills; and when a Sari man's dumb, he's either got something to say, or something not to say it."
 
"Hang it all!" cried Chantry. "I wonder if there's anything that you wouldn't think a bad sign?"
 
Aire shrugged his shoulders.
 
"Well! the die's cast," he said; "and we've got to see the thing through. The only question left is one of escort. We want to look imposing but not belligerent. What do you think?"
 
"The smaller the better," said Terrington drily.
 
"Why?"
 
"You can't take enough to make it safe for you," explained the other; "but you can take enough to make it unsafe for us."
 
"For you?" Sir Colvin asked.
 
"Suppose you don't come back?" was Terrington's reply.
 
"Gad! but you're a cheerful counsellor," cried Chantry hotly.
 
"If they murder us, eh," said Aire.
 
"And you think they mean to, Captain Terrington?" asked Rose Chantry.
 
Terrington shook his head.
 
"Not to-morrow!" he said. "Mir Khan wouldn't expect to get the chance."
 
"You mean he doesn't believe we're such unqualified fools as to go there?" Sir Colvin suggested.
 
"That's probably how he puts it," said Terrington blandly.
 
"Well that gives us a chance the more," Chantry threw in.
 
"A chance the less, I think," said Terrington. "Blood is always a Sari man's first thought, and he'll leave no time for a second."
 
The agent's dark eyes glowered with a whole-souled malediction, but Sir Colvin, tapping on the table, watched in silence for some seconds while Terrington finished his meal.
 
"Do you still try to dissuade me?" he asked at length.
 
"Not at all, sir," replied the other. "I was only thinking of the escort. If they mean murder over there they'll mean it the more the more of you there are."
 
"Why?"
 
"Supposing they intend to go for us, they'll wait till all the passes are closed, and we're cut off. In that case they'll hardly give away their game now, unless they get a chance to cripple us."
 
"Twenty men would be enough?"
 
"Ample," said Terrington. "And I'd keep as many of them outside as possible."
 
"Yes; and you might pick some of your own men for the job."
 
Terrington's face hardened. His men were his children, and he hated to let them run a risk which he could not share.
 
"In that case I'd ask the honour of going with you, sir," he said.
 
Sir Colvin shook his head.
 
"No, no!" he answered. "The Fort is your business, and it may prove a big one. Chantry is going in with me, and Langford, who's an old cavalryman, will take the escort. I've sent down word of what I'm doing, but I'll leave a fuller account with you, in case anything goes wrong." He turned with Chantry to leave the room, calling back from the doorway: "By the way, the polo's to come off to-morrow afternoon as we arranged. You're playing, aren't you?"
 
"Yes, sir," replied the other, watching the two figures pass out of the verandah, and seem to shrink as they were immersed in the fierce yellow of the sun.
 
Then he turned, and met Rose Chantry's eyes.
 
She had flung herself into a long chair: her knees were crossed; her head thrown back; her hands clasped behind it. To Terrington's vision the tip of her toe, her knee and her chin were in a line; and the absurd little sole of her shoe, with its elfin instep and the arch curl of its heel, made a print on his memory in which it was afterwards to tread.
 
"Well!" she said, with her tantalizing smile, "was the chikor good?"
 
"Excellent," he answered.
 
Her lips fluttered like the wings of a bird.
 
"Didn't it taste of defeat?" she suggested, the dark lids drooping over her eyes.
 
"No," he said gravely, "it tasted extremely game."
 
She swept him with her covert glances, but his had fallen to her foot.
 
"Why did you tell that lie?" she asked presently.
 
He looked up into her face for an instant.
 
"I've forgotten," he said.
 
"Sir Colvin wouldn't have suspected me," she added. "He knows no more about a woman than ... than you do.
 
"I suppose that leaves him without much knowledge to boast of?" he reflected.
 
"Yes," she said; "it does."
 
She tilted her head sideways to see, beyond her knee, on what his eyes were fixed. She tossed her foot clear of the muslin flounces, and then with a curious twist of the ankle brought it round into her view.
 
"What's wrong with it?" she asked.
 
He shook his head.
 
"How should I know?" he said thoughtfully. "It wasn't made for me."
 
She laughed, slowly twirling her foot, as though fascinated by its suppleness, or by the gleaming creases of the silk that covered it. Then, with a little jerk of her knee, she let it settle again into the froth of flounces.
 
"Really," she said, "for a man who says so little, you do say the strangest things."
 
His eyes had wandered again to the square of open air, the picture in azure and ochre and emerald which the window made in the wall. The brown woman still sat swinging her bead in the shade of the chenar. Terrington could see its glassy blueness as it dipped to and fro across a splinter of sunlight.
 
Rose Chantry, with her eyes on his profile, asked him at what he was looking.
 
He told her.
 
"I know!" she exclaimed. "Why is she always doing that?"
 
"She wants a child," he said.
 
"But she has one."
 
"Another then."
 
She gave a shudder.
 
"What strange things women are!" she cried.
 
His eyes came round to her, and she felt a coldness in them like the green gleam of ice.
 
"Out here, you see," he said quietly, "women are still as fond of making men as of making fools of them."
 
"Why do you say that?" she asked sharply.
 
"I could think of nothing better," he replied.
 
"Why did you say it to me?" she persisted.
 
"To whom else could I have said it?" he enquired blandly.
 
The blaze of anger seemed to fill her eyes with a floating sparkle of fresh colours, and her lips closed tightly, as though to repress a desire to bite him. Then she met his glance and laughed.
 
"I wonder why you dislike me so," she said.
 
"I don't dislike you," he replied.
 
"Oh, well!" she sighed, "why don't you dislike me, then; since you seem too? You wish I wasn't here!"
 
"Very much," he admitted.
 
"Why? What harm do I do?"
 
"Haven't you told me that this morning?"
 
"No!" she cried. "You weren't thinking of that; you know you weren't. You believe that would have happened anyhow. It was what you meant about making fools of men."
 
"Well," he said, "don't you make fools of them?"
 
She shook her head softly.
 
"My mistake then," he said.
 
"Ah!" she sighed, "but you don't think so. I daresay you think something much more horrid of me than you care to say. And it ought to have been rather nice for you all, having me up here."
 
"Yes," he said, "I think it ought."
 
She looked at him doubtfully, crumpling her lips together in her fingers.
 
"But you do make mistakes," she went on retrospectively.
 
"Yes," he said, "one makes everything of them."
 
She regarded him for a moment in the light of the remark, before adding:
 
"You told me, the first time you saw me, I must give up riding."
 
"Yes," he admitted, smiling; "that was one of them. But I found that your riding could be of use to us."
 
"Of use to you?" she exclaimed.
 
"Yes, in creating a false impression."
 
"An impression of what?"
 
"Of security: that we did not think you were in any danger."
 
"Though you thought I was?"
 
"I was sure of it," he said.
 
She was sitting upright now; her hands set upon the chair-arms; her face changing stormily between anger and astonishment.
 
"You were sure I was in danger, yet you did nothing to prevent it!" she cried. "Do you mean that?"
 
"What should I have done?" he enquired.
 
"Warned me!" she said
 
"But didn't I?"
 
"Oh, that!" she exclaimed impatiently.
 
"And would you have been warned?"
 
"I don't know. I can't say. That's got nothing to do with it. Or you could have given me an escort."
 
He shook his head.
 
"That would have made you no safer, and would have spoilt you as an advertisement."
 
"As an advertisement!" she protested hotly. "Do soldiers let a woman run the risk of being murdered to make things safe far them? I think it's contemptible!"
 
"Yes," he said quietly; "so I see: but you don't think enough."
 
He sat looking at her in a way she detested; as no other man seemed able to look at her; as though she were a piece in a game he played.
 
"Did any one else know it wasn't safe for me?" she demanded.
 
He shook his head.
 
"Wouldn't you have been warned in that case?" he suggested.
 
"Yes," she returned warmly, "I'm quite certain I should."
 
"I think so too," he said. "Nothing in Sar would have been weighed beside it."
 
"Except by you," she retorted.
 
"Except by me," he said. "You see I'm here to weigh things. I'm here to look after you all. You think I should have told you of your danger, and shut you up in the safety of Sar. But there is no safety in Sar. That's the mistake. Your riding was a risk, but it helped our chance to make Sar safer; safer for every one, safer for you."
 
"And suppose I had been killed?"
 
"Well," he said, "you can fancy what I should have paid for it. But the safety would have been there, though it was only there for others. And it was to make that that I am here."
 
She met his musing observation of her with hard clear eyes.
 
"Haven't you wasted an unusual lot of time talking to me this morning, Captain Terrington?" she said.
 
He took the deep breath of a man whose heart is sick for sleep, and threw back his shoulders.
 
"Yes," he smiled, rising; "I was quite exceptionally tired."