No More Learning

, return to her old
love, etc. , etc. , for eight closely-written pages. From an artistic
point of view, it was very neat work, but an ordinary Philistine, who
knew the state of Phil's real feelings--not the ones he rose to as he
went on writing--would have called it the thoroughly mean and selfish
work of a thoroughly mean and selfish, weak man. But this verdict would
have been incorrect. Phil paid for the postage, and felt every word he
had written for at least two days and a half.

It was the last flicker before the light went out.

That letter made Agnes Laiter very unhappy, and she cried and put it
away in her desk, and became Mrs. Somebody Else for the good of her
family. Which is the first duty of every Christian maid.

Phil went his ways, and thought no more of his letter, except as an
artist thinks of a neatly touched-in sketch. His ways were not bad, but
they were not altogether good until they brought him across Dunmaya, the
daughter of a Rajput ex-Subadar-Major of our Native Army. The girl had a
strain of Hill blood in her, and, like the Hill women, was not a purdah
nashin. Where Phil met her, or how he heard of her, does not matter. She
was a good girl and handsome, and, in her way, very clever and shrewd;
though, of course, a little hard.
It is to be remembered that Phil was
living very comfortably, denying himself no small luxury, never putting
by an anna, very satisfied with himself and his good intentions, was
dropping all his English correspondents one by one, and beginning more
and more to look upon this land as his home. Some men fall this way; and
they are of no use afterwards. The climate where he was stationed was
good, and it really did not seem to him that there was anything to go
Home for.

He did what many planters have done before him--that is to say, he
made up his mind to marry a Hill girl and settle down. He was seven and
twenty then, with a long life before him, but no spirit to go through
with it. So he married Dunmaya by the forms of the English Church, and
some fellow-planters said he was a fool, and some said he was a
wise man. Dunmaya was a thoroughly honest girl, and, in spite of her
reverence for an Englishman, had a reasonable estimate of her husband's
weaknesses. She managed him tenderly, and became, in less than a year, a
very passable imitation of an English lady in dress and carriage. [It
is curious to think that a Hill man, after a lifetime's education, is
a Hill man still; but a Hill woman can in six months master most of the
ways of her English sisters. There was a coolie woman once. But that is
another story. ] Dunmaya dressed by preference in black and yellow, and
looked well.

Meantime the letter lay in Agnes's desk, and now and again she would
think of poor resolute hard-working Phil among the cobras and tigers of
Darjiling, toiling in the vain hope that she might come back to him. Her
husband was worth ten Phils, except that he had rheumatism of the
heart. Three years after he was married--and after he had tried Nice
and Algeria for his complaint--he went to Bombay, where he died, and set
Agnes free. Being a devout woman, she looked on his death and the
place of it, as a direct interposition of Providence, and when she had
recovered from the shock, she took out and reread Phil's letter with the
"etc.