CHAPTER I
On a Moonlight Night in Simla
"I do hope you are not going to weep!" said Nina.
She and he sat on a far-sheltered corner of the terrace in the gray shadow, and she had just told him that "everything was over."
As "everything" had been going on for the best part of three months, it was, perhaps, only natural that she should experience some concern as to how he meant to take it.
He was slow to reassure her, and she was impatient. "Because," she explained, "I never know just what to say or do when they weep. I'm never at a loss at other times; but—"
"Of course I shall not weep," he protested at length, with something of indignation in his tone. "Whatever gave you such an idea?"
"It isn't unusual," she explained. "Sometimes they storm. I've known them to swear most awfully. But when they are young, as you are, they so often just melt; and it is very trying, you know. Perhaps you'll swear. I'd much rather have it so. There was Emborough, for instance. He—"
"If you don't mind," he cut in, "I'd prefer not to hear."
"Ah, I see!" she exclaimed quickly. "You are neither going to weep nor storm. You are going to be just plain disagreeable. And if there is anything I hate it is a man who mopes."
He was thinking very hard, and for the moment he had failed to follow her. Disaster had dropped upon him like a bolt from the blue at the moment of his greatest confidence.
It was at Simla where, Kipling says, "all things begin and many come to an evil end;" and something, it seemed, had come to an end—evil or otherwise—as well as the season and the last of the dances at Viceregal Lodge.
Ten minutes ago he had been so convinced that the end was to be "otherwise" that even now he couldn't believe it was to be evil.
"Why," he managed to say after a brief pause, "I don't understand you at all. I—"
"No one ever has understood me," she assured him. "Even when I've gone to the trouble of explaining they manage somehow to get the explanation all upside down. It's very tiresome—very."
"I really thought you loved me! You—"
"They all think I love them. That's the odd part of it. I'm sure I never told any one. And yet they are so conceited—Oh, why can't you men appreciate being petted and amused, without imagining that it must be inspired by adoration and coupled with a desire for life-long attachment?"
"You promised to bolt with me," he asserted boldly.
Nina's chair jumped back three inches, impelled by the reflexes of a slim but sturdy pair of long legs. Hers, not the chair's.
"I abominate a liar!" she announced firmly.
"So do I," he came back. "You did promise me. It was during that last waltz."
"I am never responsible for what I say when waltzing."
"You admit it, then?"
"I admit nothing. I neither confirm nor deny. I don't know."
"But we came out here to arrange it. Or don't you remember that, either?"
"I fancied it was because you wished to smoke."
"God!" he exclaimed suddenly. "How can you be so bitterly cruel!"
She may have been a reincarnated tigress—in after years there was a man who always declared so—and then again she may not. It is quite possible that circumstance and environment made her what she was.
Certainly at heart Nina Darling was not a bad woman. There were times when she tried very hard to be a very good woman according to her lights. And yet, somehow, somewhere within her she seemed to possess a faculty for making men wretched.
The world—or a very large part of it—regarded it as an insatiable craving, an unappeasable appetite—a sort of lust for personal aggrandizement, growing out of personal vanity. But then the world knew nothing of Nina Darling's secret—which made all the difference.
For right judgment a few facts will not serve. Unless we have them all we are likely to fall into error. To argue from effect back to cause is a very risky undertaking. And that was what most people did in Nina Darling's case.
Young Gerald Andrews, of the civil service, the most recent victim, whom she had had in leading strings ever since he came to Simla, fancied her from the very first the most beautiful creature he had ever seen.
Now, stung by the lash of her scorn, the sheer fact of her unattainableness seemed to redouble her charm.
There was something wraithlike about her. She appeared to hold kinship with the moonlight, which in its loveliness overspread lawns and flowerbeds near at hand and turned to opal the mists that hung and swayed over the valley beneath them, where the lovely Annandale roses were blowing.
Until now he had always thought that her big eyes were violet-blue. But suddenly he saw opal lights in them and opal flame. And her gown was not white and silver, as he had fancied, but spun of moonbeams and studded with opals.
Her long, sinuous figure, more revealed than hidden by its gauzy investure, suggested to him Lilith, and the medieval conception of an angel as well.
He hardly expected an answer to the exclamatory question wrung from him by the torture of her words, but she had it ready.
"Because I eminently prefer my matrimonial frying-pan to the blistering coals of the illicit," she said coolly.
The boy—for he was scarcely more, big and handsome and strong though he appeared—looked terribly wobegone. But on the comparison floated a straw, and like the proverbial drowning man, he clutched at it.
"You admit it's a frying-pan," he reminded her.
"Sizzling hot," she told him. "I'm scorched through and through. My heart's a cinder."
The straw went under, carrying him with it, but he still clung on. "Let me take you out of it," he pleaded desperately.
But her shapely shoulders rose in a discouraging shrug.
"Into the fire?" she asked calmly.
"Into Elysium."
She laughed at that. "Worse," she said with a touch of cynicism. "The home of the blessed dead! I'm not blessed and I'm not dead—and I don't want to be!"
"You know I didn't mean