I kept out of Miss Harris’s way so studiously for the next week or two that she was kind enough in the end to feel compelled to send for me. I went with misgivings--I expected, as may be imagined, to be very deeply distressed. She met me with a storm of gay reproaches. I had never seen her in better health or spirits. My surprise must have been more evident than I supposed or intended, for before I went away she told me the whole story. By that time she had heard from Ceylon, a delicious letter with a pen-and-ink sketch at the top. I have it still; it infallibly brought the man back to me. But it was all over; she assured me with shining eyes that it was. The reason of her plainly boundless thankfulness that Armour had run away from the School of Art did not come to the surface until I was just going. Then I gathered that if he had taken the post she would have felt compelled, compelled by all she had done for him, to share its honours with him; and this, ever since at her bidding he had begun to gather such things up, was precisely what she had lost all inclination to do.
We were married the following October. We had a big, gorgeous official wedding, which we both enjoyed enormously. I took furlough, and we went home, but we found London very expensive and the country very slow; and with my K.C.S.I. came the offer of the Membership, so we went back to Simla for three perfectly unnecessary years, which we now look back upon with pleasure and regret. I fear that we, no more than Ingersoll Armour, were quite whole-hearted Bohemians; but I don’t know that we really ever pretended to be.
When it became known that Madeline Anderson had finally decided to go abroad for two years, her little circle in New York naturally talked a good deal, in review, about her curious reason for never having gone before. So much that happened afterward, so much that I am going to tell, depends upon this reason for not going before, that I also must talk about it and explain it; I could never bring it out just as we went along. It would have been a curious reason in connection with anybody, but doubly so as explaining the behaviour of Miss Anderson, whose profile gave you the impression that she was anything but the shuttlecock of her emotions. Shortly, her reason was a convict, Number 1596, who, up to February in that year, had been working, or rather waiting, out his sentence in the State penitentiary. So long as he worked or waited, Madeline remained in New York, but when in February death gave him his quittance, she took her freedom too, with wide intentions and many coupons.
