walk by the side of any living woman's 'rickshaw, deep in
conversation. The second and most tormenting of my moods of
sickness had suddenly laid hold upon me, and like the Prince in
Tennyson's poem, "I seemed to move amid a world of ghosts."
There had been a garden-party at the Commander-in-Chief's, and
we two joined the crowd of homeward-bound folk. As I saw them
then it seemed that _they_ were the shadows--impalpable, fantastic
shadows--that divided for Mrs. Wessington's 'rickshaw to pass
through. What we said during the course of that weird interview I
cannot--indeed, I dare not--tell. Heatherlegh's comment would have
been a short laugh and a remark that I had been "mashing a
brain-eye-and-stomach chimera." It was a ghastly and yet in some
indefinable way a marvelously dear experience. Could it be
possible, I wondered, that I was in this life to woo a second time
the woman I had killed by my own neglect and cruelty?

I met Kitty on the homeward road--a shadow among shadows.

If I were to describe all the incidents of the next fortnight in their
order, my story would never come to an end; and your patience
would be exhausted. Morning after morning and evening after
evening the ghostly 'rickshaw and I used to wander through Simla
together. Wherever I went there the four black and white liveries
followed me and bore me company to and from my hotel. At the
Theatre I found them amid the crowd or yelling _jhampanies_;
outside the Club veranda, after a long evening of whist; at the
Birthday Ball, waiting patiently for my reappearance; and in broad
daylight when I went calling. Save that it cast no shadow, the
'rickshaw was in every respect as real to look upon as one of wood
and iron. More than once, indeed, I have had to check myself from