horse had been led away, he stooped to kiss her, and she rested her head for one moment against his shoulder, just to feel that that was what life meant. She felt better, more like Ida Craven, and said— "Oh Arthur, Hugh Linwood's here." "Who's Hugh Linwood?" he asked rather savagely. He was weary, at any rate; and this man with a Christian name, thrown at him by his wife, was just too much.

"He was at Bagnères with us; he is a cousin of the Maxwells; I have known him well all my life," she answered awkwardly, it seemed so odd to give an account of Hugh to any one.

"Oh," said Arthur shortly. "Where does he come from now, and what does he belong to?"

"I don't know; I did not ask him." And she blushed with the consciousness that she had been very foolish to be so much dazed by the sight of him as not

to ask the common-place questions of where and when.

Arthur saw the blush, and did not know what to make of it, and said

"It is surely odd, if you know so much about this fellow that you don't know what he belongs to. What's his name? Hugh something?"

"Linwood-Mr. Linwood," she answered timidly. "He said something about his colonel knowing you (Stanley), and they can't have been here very long."

Oh, Stanley-Stanley's Horse! One of his officers is he?"-and he poured himself out some tea, and stood by the table to drink it. And after a little he went on, as if talking to himself, "I am glad they are here; we shall want them soon for mounted orderlies, the police are losing their heads."

(C How are frontier affairs going on?" asked Ida, glad to get off the question of Hugh.

"There is really no knowing," answered

Craven, "except that there may be any amount of mischief before us, and that the Mulka people have certainly been receiving large sums of money across the frontier; and that must mean people to pay it, hands to carry it, and something to be done with it when there. Can you get breakfast early to-day? I have much to do, and shall go down to kutcherry before the courts open, to see some people."

"Very well, Arthur," she said. "I'll have breakfast on table by nine.

Will that do ?"

said, as she rose

"Yes, darling; and," he to go into the house, "don't call that fellow, whoever he is, Hugh again. You are not a girl now; and I think I should feel tempted to knock him down if I heard him call you Ida."

"Very well, Arthur," she said again, and went away, choking much at the time, and feeling that he might have left that to her. She had known it as well as he could; and even amid her surprise and bewilderment

of the meeting had thought of it, and acted on her thought at once.

"He might have left it to me,” she said to herself more than once; and it was only after she was again alone for the day that she remembered that there was something to be said on the other side. She had been very foolishly disturbed by the sight of Hugh; and then, he he had been her lover. This Arthur did not know. It seemed so foolish, that story of long ago, that she had shrunk from telling it; and really there seemed so little to tell; and though she would have been glad now that Arthur should know it, she did not see her way to speaking after this warning about the Christian name, which had hurt her a good deal. And so the day passed, and nothing was said; Ida acting unconsciously on the clumsy fallacy that two wrongs make one right.

CHAPTER XI.

"NONSENSE."

THE next morning Ida had plenty to do without going for her usual ride, making preparations for her guests, the Maxwells. There were three of them,-husband, wife, and child; the latter (not the bright flaxen haired Frankie who was thriving at Hastings) was a baby of ten months old, smaller and fairer, called Hugh, after the cousin whom we know.

Mary arrived early, as she had ridden in with the battery, and the child followed with his ayah in a doolie,-the rude covered litter common to all the less civilized parts of India. Mary, of course, arrived alone. Captain Maxwell, who commanded X Battery, L Brigade, R. H. A., having to see his men into the quarters assigned to them in the Artillery Barrack Square, sent word by his