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had acted on the impulse of the moment. He explained this afterwards.
    Then the voice cried, ‘O Lionel!’ Lionel was the Senior Subaltern’sname. A woman came into the little circle of light by the candles on the peg-tables, stretching out her hands to the dark where the Senior Subaltern was, and sobbing. We rose to our feet, feeling that things were going to happen and ready to believe the worst. In this bad, small world of ours, one knows so little of the life of the next man – which, after all, is entirely his own concern – that one is not surprised when a crash comes. Anything might turn up any day for anyone. Perhaps the Senior Subaltern had been trapped in his youth. Men are crippled that way occasionally. We didn’t know; we wanted to hear; and the Captains’ wives were as anxious as we. If he had been trapped, he was to be excused; for the woman from nowhere, in the dusty shoes and grey travelling-dress, was very lovely, with black hair and great eyes full of tears. She was tall, with a fine figure, and her voice had a running sob in it pitiful to hear. As soon as the Senior Subaltern stood up, she threw her arms round his neck, and called him ‘my darling’, and said she could not bear waiting alone in England, and his letters were so short and cold, and she was his to the end of the world, and would he forgive her? This did not sound quite like a lady’s way of speaking. It was too demonstrative.
    Things seemed black indeed, and the Captains’ wives peered under their eyebrows at the Senior Subaltern, and the Colonel’s face set like the Day of Judgment framed in grey bristles, and no one spoke for a while.
    Next the Colonel said, very shortly, ‘Well, Sir?’ and the woman sobbed afresh. The Senior Subaltern was half choked with the arms round his neck, but he gasped out – ‘It’s a damned lie! I never had a wife in my life!’ – ‘Don’t swear,’ said the Colonel. ‘Come into the Mess. We must sift this clear somehow,’ and he sighed to himself, for he believed in his ‘Shikarris’, did the Colonel.
    We trooped into the ante-room, under the full lights, and there we saw how beautiful the woman was. She stood up in the middle of us all, sometimes choking with crying, then hard and proud, and then holding out her arms to the Senior Subaltern. It was like the fourth act of a tragedy. She told us how the Senior Subaltern had married her when he was Home on leave eighteen months before; and she seemed to know all that we knew, and more too, of his people and his past life. He was white and ashy-grey, trying now and again to break into the torrent of her words; and we, noting how lovely she was and what a criminal he looked, esteemed him a beast of the worst kind. We felt sorry for him, though.
    I shall never forget the indictment of the Senior Subaltern by his wife. Nor will he. It was so sudden, rushing out of the dark, unannounced,into our dull lives. The Captains’ wives stood back; but their eyes were alight, and you could see that they had already convicted and sentenced the Senior Subaltern. The Colonel seemed five years older. One Major was shading his eyes with his hand and watching the woman from underneath it. Another was chewing his moustache and smiling quietly as if he were witnessing a play. Full in the open space in the centre, by the whist-tables, the Senior Subaltern’s terrier was hunting for fleas. I remember all this as clearly as though a photograph were in my hand. I remember the look of horror on the Senior Subaltern’s face. It was rather like seeing a man hanged; but much more interesting. Finally, the woman wound up by saying that the Senior Subaltern carried a double F. M. in tattoo on his left shoulder. We all knew that, and to our innocent minds it seemed to clinch the matter. But one of the bachelor Majors said very politely, ‘I presume that your marriage-certificate