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The Tigress
The Tigress
CHAPTER I
On a Moonlight Night in Simla
"I do hope you are not going to weep!" said Nina.
She and he sat on a far-sheltered corner of the terrace in the gray shadow, and she had just told him that "everything was over."
As "everything" had been going on for the best part of three months, it was, perhaps, only natural that she should experience some concern as to how he meant to take it.
He was slow to reassure her, and she was impatient. "Because," she explained, "I never know just what to say or do when they weep. I'm never at a loss at other times; but – "
"Of course I shall not weep," he protested at length, with something of indignation in his tone. "Whatever gave you such an idea?"
"It isn't unusual," she explained. "Sometimes they storm. I've known them to swear most awfully. But when they are young, as you are, they so often just melt; and it is very trying, you know. Perhaps you'll swear. I'd much rather have it so. There was Emborough, for instance. He – "
"If you don't mind," he cut in, "I'd prefer not to hear."
"Ah, I see!" she exclaimed quickly. "You are neither going to weep nor storm. You are going to be just plain disagreeable. And if there is anything I hate it is a man who mopes."
He was thinking very hard, and for the moment he had failed to follow her. Disaster had dropped upon him like a bolt from the blue at the moment of his greatest confidence.
It was at Simla where, Kipling says, "all things begin and many come to an evil end;" and something, it seemed, had come to an end – evil or otherwise – as well as the season and the last of the dances at Viceregal Lodge.