Night after night Merryon lay on his veranda, smoking his pipe in stark endurance while the dreadful hours crept by.

Sometimes he held a letter from his wife hard clenched in one powerful hand.

She wrote to him frequently--short, airy epistles, wholly inconsequent, often provocatively meagre.
"There is a Captain Silvester here," she wrote once; "such a bounder.
But he is literally the only man who can dance in the station.

So what would you?
Poor Mrs.Paget is so shocked!" Feathery hints of this description were by no means unusual, but though Merryon sometimes frowned over them, they did not make him uneasy.

His will-o'-the-wisp might beckon, but she would never allow herself to be caught.