"I am very pleased to hear it," said Scott. "And it is extremely kind of you to say so."
"It's the truth," she maintained. "And, oh, you haven't been smoking all this time. Don't you want to?"
He stopped at once, and took out his cigarette-case. "Now you mention it,
I think I do. But I mustn't dawdle. I have got to get back to Isabel."
Dinah waited while the cigarette kindled. Then, with a touch of shyness, she spoke.
"Mr. Studley, has—has your sister been an invalid for long?"
He looked at her. "Do you want to hear about her?"
"Yes, please," said Dinah. "If you don't mind."
He began to walk on. It was evident that the hill was something of a difficulty to him. He moved slowly, and his limp became more pronounced. "No, I should like to tell you about her," he said. "You were so good yesterday, and I hadn't prepared you in the least. I hope it didn't give you a shock."
"Of course it didn't," Dinah answered. "I'm not such a donkey as that. I was only very, very sorry."
"Thank you," he said, as if she had expressed direct sympathy with himself. "It's hard to believe, isn't it, that seven years ago she was—even lovelier than the beautiful Miss de Vigne, only in a very different style?"
"Not in the least," Dinah assured him. "She is far lovelier than Rose now. She must have been—beautiful."
"She was," said Scott. "She was like Eustace, except that she was always much softer than he is. You would scarcely believe either that she is three years younger than he is, would you?"
"I certainly shouldn't," Dinah admitted. "But then, she must have come through years of suffering."
"Yes," Scott spoke with slight constraint, as though he could not bear to dwell on the subject. "She was a girl of intensely vivid feelings, very passionate and warmhearted. She and Eustace were inseparable in the old days. They did everything together. He thought more of her than of anyone else in the world. He does still."
"He wasn't very nice to her last night," Dinah ventured.
"No. He is often like that, and she is afraid of him. But the reason of it is that he feels her trouble so horribly, and whenever he sees her in that mood it hurts him intolerably. He is quite a good chap underneath, Miss Bathurst. Like Isabel, he feels certain things intensely. Of course he is five years older than I am, and we have never been pals in the sense that he and she were pals. I was always a slow-goer, and they went like the wind. But I know him. I know what his feelings are, and what this thing has been to him. And though I am now much more to Isabel than he will probably ever be again, he has never resented it or been anything but generous and willing to give place to me. That, you know, indicates greatness. With all his faults, he is great."
"He shouldn't make her afraid of him," Dinah said.
"I am afraid that is inevitable. He is strong, and she has lost her strength. Her marriage too alienated them in the first place. She had refused so many before Basil Everard came along, and I suppose he had begun to think that she was not the marrying sort. But Everard caught her almost in a day. They met in India. Eustace and she were touring there one winter. Everard was a senior subaltern in a Ghurka regiment—an awfully taking chap evidently. They practically fell in love with one another at sight. Poor old Eustace!" Scott paused, faintly smiling. "He meant her to marry well if she married at all, and Basil was no more than the son of a country parson without a penny to his name. However, the thing was past remedy. I saw that when they came home, and Isabel told me about it. I was at Oxford then. She came down alone for a night, and begged me to try and talk Eustace over. It was the beginning of a barrier between them even then. It has grown high since. Eustace is a difficult man to move, you know. I did my level best with him, but I wasn't very successful. In the end of course the inevitable happened. Isabel lost patience and broke away. She was on her way out again before either of us knew. Eustace—of course Eustace was furious." Scott paused again.
Dinah's silence denoted keen interest. Her expression was absorbed.
He went on, the touch of constraint again apparent in his manner. It was evident that the narration stirred up deep feelings. "We three had always hung together. The family tie meant a good deal to us for the simple reason that we were practically the only Studleys left. My father had died six years before, my mother at my birth. Eustace was the head of the family, and he and Isabel had been all in all to each other. He felt her going more than I can possibly tell you, and scarcely a week after the news came he got his things together and went off in the yacht to South America to get over it by himself. I stayed on at Oxford, but I made up my mind to go out to her in the vacation. A few days after his going, I had a cable to say they were married. A week after that, there came another cable to say that Everard was dead."
"Oh!" Dinah drew a short, hard breath. "Poor Isabel!" she whispered.
"Yes." Scott's pale eyes were gazing straight ahead. "He was killed two days after the marriage. They had gone up to the Hills, to a place he knew of right in the wilds on the side of a mountain, and pitched camp there. There were only themselves, a handful of Pathan coolies with mules, and a shikari. The day after they got there, he took her up the mountain to show her some of the beauties of the place, and they lunched on a ledge about a couple of hundred feet above a great lonely tarn. It was a wonderful place but very savage, horribly desolate. They rested after the meal, and then, Isabel being still tired, he left her to bask in the sunshine while he went a little further. He told her to wait for him. He was only going round the corner. There was a great bastion of rock jutting on to the ledge. He wanted to have a look round the other side of it. He went—and he never came back."
"He fell?" Dinah turned a shocked face upon him. "Oh, how dreadful!"
"He must have fallen. The ledge dwindled on the other side of the rock to little more than four feet in width for about six yards. There was a sheer drop below into the pool. A man of steady nerve, accustomed to mountaineering, would make nothing of it; and, from what Isabel has told me of him, I gather he was that sort of man. But on that particular afternoon something must have happened. Perhaps his happiness had unsteadied him a bit, for they were absolutely happy together. Or it may have been the heat. Anyhow he fell, he must have fallen. And no one ever knew any more than that."
"How dreadful!" Dinah whispered again. "And she was left—all alone?"
"Quite alone except for the natives, and they didn't find her till the day after. She was pacing up and down the ledge then, up and down, up and down eternally, and she refused—flatly refused—to leave it till he should come back. She had spent the whole night there alone, waiting, getting more and more distraught, and they could do nothing with her. They were afraid of her. Never from that day to this has she admitted for a moment that he must have been killed, though in her heart she knows it, poor girl, just as she knew it from the very beginning."
"But what happened?" breathed Dinah. "What did they do? They couldn't leave her there."
"They didn't know what to do. The shikari was the only one with any ideas among them, and he wasn't especially brilliant. But after another day and night he hit on the notion of sending one of the coolies back with the news while he and the other men waited and watched. They kept her supplied with food. She must have eaten almost mechanically. But she never left that ledge. And yet—and yet—she was kept from taking the one step that would have ended it all. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't have been better—more merciful—" He broke off.
"Perhaps God was watching her," murmured Dinah shyly.
"Yes, I tell myself that. But even so, I can't help wondering sometimes." Scott's voice was very sad. "She was left so terribly desolate," he said. "Those letters that you saw last night are all she has of him. He has gone, and taken the mainspring of her life with him. I hate to think of what followed. They sent up a doctor from the nearest station, and she was taken away—taken by force. When I got to her three weeks later, she was mad, raving mad, with