Colonel de Warrenne had omitted to tell his wife so--after she had
accepted him--and she had died thinking herself loveless, unloved, and
stating the fact.

This was the bitterest drop in the bitter cup of the big, dumb,
well-meaning man.

And now she would never know....

She had thought herself unloved, and, nerve-shattered by her terrible
experience with the snake, had made no fight for life when the
unwanted boy was born. For the sake of a girl she would have striven
to live--but a boy, a boy can fend for himself (and takes after his
father)....

Almost as soon as Lenore Seymour Stukeley had landed in India (on a
visit with her sister Yvette to friends at Bimariabad), delighted,
bewildered, depolarized, Colonel Matthew Devon de Warrenne had burst
with a blaze of glory into her hitherto secluded, narrow life--a great
pale-blue, white-and-gold wonder, clanking and jingling, resplendent,
bemedalled, ruling men, charging at the head of thundering
squadrons--a half-god (and to Yvette he had seemed a whole-god).

He had told her that he loved her, told her once, and had been
accepted.

_Once_! Only once told her that he loved her, that she was beautiful,
that he was hers to command to the uttermost. Only once! What could
_she_ know of the changed life, the absolute renunciation of pleasant