A gaunt figure met him almost on the threshold, and he recognized his messenger with a sharp sense of coming disaster. The man stood mutely at the salute.
"Well? Well? Speak!" he ordered, nearly beside himself with anxiety. "Why didn't you come back with an answer?"
The man spoke with deep submission. "_Sahib_, there was no answer."
"What do you mean by that? What the--Here, let me pass!" cried Merryon, in a ferment. "There must have been--some sort of answer."
"No, _sahib_. No answer." The man spoke with inscrutable composure. "The _mem-sahib_ has not come back," he said. "Let the _sahib_ see for himself."
But Merryon had already burst into the bungalow; so he resumed his patient watch on the veranda, wholly undisturbed, supremely patient.
The _khitmutgar_ came forward at his master's noisy entrance. There was a trace--just the shadow of a suggestion--of anxiety on his dignified face under the snow-white turban. He presented him with a note on a salver with a few murmured words and a deep salaam.
"For the _sahib's_ hands alone," he said.
Merryon snatched up the note and opened it with shaking hands.
It was very brief, pathetically so, and as he read a great emptiness seemed to spread and spread around him in an ever-widening desolation.
"Good-bye, my Billikins!" Ah, the pitiful, childish scrawl she had made of it! "I've come to my senses, and I've gone back to him. I'm not worthy of any sacrifice of yours, dear. And it would have been a big sacrifice. You wouldn't like being dragged through the mud, but I'm used to it. It came to me just that moment that you said, 'Yes, of course,' when Mr. Harley came to call you back to duty. Duty is better than a worthless woman, my Billikins, and I was never fit to be anything more than a toy to you--a toy to play with and toss aside. And so good-bye, good-bye!"
The scrawl ended with a little cross at the bottom of the page. He looked up from it with eyes gone blind with pain and a stunned and awful sense of loss.
"When did the _mem-sahib_ go?" he questioned, dully.
The _khitmutgar_ bent his stately person. "The _mem-sahib_ went in haste," he said, "an hour before midnight. Your servant followed her to the _dâk-bungalow_ to protect her from _budmashes_, but she dismissed me ere she entered in. _Sahib_, I could do no more."