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the price of my stupidity and my silence, so I must return to England to set things right, if I can. Though nothing can right the perfidy of that day when men and horses died by the dozens in the dust of those brutal plains under the damned, underestimated, relentless thunder of the Ayub’s artillery.”
    “Of what battle do you speak so harshly, Mr. Stanhope?” I asked. I confess that I have never paid much attention to these innumerable skirmishes with outlandish appellations so often fought under foreign skies by my countrymen.
    “Maiwand,” he answered in loathing tones, as if mouthing the devil’s pet name. “A black day for England, and for Maclaine, and for a fool with the youthful hubris to call himself ‘Cobra.’ “
    I barely recalled this engagement, but Irene raised an imperious hand, leaning forward in her chair, her eyes gleaming with dawning intelligence. “Maiwand was nearly a decade ago, Mr. Stanhope. Its name is forgotten except in the military histories, though it was far from England’s finest hour. What is the present danger? What is the name of the man you seek, whose life you fear for?”
    “A man who saved my own life.”
    “And who is he?”
    Young Mr. Stanhope—and so I still thought of him, despite the lapse of years and his present, much-fallen circumstance—was strangely silent. His sun-darkened face held that inscrutability said to accompany an Oriental turn of mind. This was not the blithe youth who had left Berkeley Square in high spirits but a decade before.
    “I know naught of him but those few hectic minutes we shared amid a battlefield dust storm,” he finally said, picking at the crochet work—my own—on the bed linens.
    Irene leaned back, looking even more inscrutable than he. “Now you truly intrigue me, Mr. Stanhope. You seek a nameless man, whose face must have been obscured when you encountered one another during the heat of battle and whose semblance is certainly time-blurred by this late date. Please tell me at least that he is English! That would narrow the field of search somewhat.”
    “Why should he not be English?” Mr. Stanhope shot back.
    “He might have been an enemy, or an Irishman.”
    Mr. Stanhope laughed at her quick retort and sardonic wit. Irishmen were frequently soldiers of fortune and ever the enemy to England even as they served under British rule.
    “He is English,” Emerson Stanhope conceded in a raw voice of weariness, though the cautious fire in his eyes that Irene’s questions had lit remained unbanked.
    “I am relieved.” Irene stood, catching Godfrey’s eye. “Then you are in the right place. Perhaps we can help you find your quarry.”
    “I do not require help, save in your kindness to an ill man.”
    “An ill man and a hunted one, I think.”
    He made a denying hand gesture but Irene ignored it. “It seems that the life this mysterious gentleman saved is not much regarded by its owner, for that life also appears in fresh and more sinister danger than ever on a battlefield.”
    “I merely suffer a relapse of fever. It is you who are delirious, Madame, with your hints of poison and conspiracy.”
    “I am often taken that way,” Irene said lightly. “It comes of an apprenticeship in grand opera. Forgive me for harrying you at a time of such weakness. I will leave you to the tender nursing of Miss Huxleigh. No doubt you both have much to discuss.”
    Her skirts rustled imperiously as she swept out of the bedchamber.
    Godfrey paused by the bed. “If you feel strong enough tomorrow, we can move you to the garden for a time; fresh air should do more for fever than anything else.”
    Mr. Stanhope’s hazel eyes crinkled at the comers. “And a smoke, Mr. Norton? I admit that I could use a decent smoke. Outdoors it would not disturb the ladies.”
    Godfrey laughed at that, no doubt well aware that the activity would never discomfit one lady in particular. “If you hope to hide from my wife’s curiosity behind a haze of cigar