The Woman in the Bazaar

								

wild beasts? Was it true that the social life was demoralising to the
European? And how about the question of drink, and the example set in
that respect, and others, by the English? Also, was it a fact that the
Oriental was possessed of strange faculties that could not be explained,
and had Captain Coventry himself ever seen a man climb up a rope and
vanish into space?
All of which Captain Coventry answered to the best of his capability,
the whole while cogitating how he might contrive his next meeting with
the vicar's daughter. At last a casual reference to the coming sale of
work presented an excellent opportunity.
"I wonder if I might bring my mother and my sister to the show?" he
asked with diffidence. "They take such a keen interest in things of that
description." And he explained how easy it would be to manage if he
chartered a conveyance for the afternoon.
Naturally the idea met with cordial encouragement, and led to further
interchange of personal information. By the time Captain Coventry had
begun to feel that he could, with decency, remain no longer, he was on
most friendly terms with the Reverend Mr. Forte and Rafella, the
clergyman's only child.

                               CHAPTER II



                             IN THE GARDEN

Until the day of the sale of work at Under-edge Vicarage Coventry lived
through the hours as one in a dream, dominated by the mental vision of a
gentle girl, by his ardent longing for the moment when he should see her
face again. He realised that he had actually fallen in love at first
sight, admitted the fact to himself with grudging reluctance, seeing
that hitherto he had scoffed at belief in such a possibility--like a
person who suddenly sees a ghost after contemptuous denial of the
supernatural.
He intended to make the girl his wife. She might not be accomplished or
clever; her education must necessarily have been limited, reared, as she
had been, so apart from the world. Yet if she were ignorant in the
accepted sense of the word, she must also be innocent, guileless,
unacquainted with evil--white and unsullied in thought and experience.
He had no desire for an intellectual wife; in his opinion the more women
knew the more objectionable they became.
George Coventry was the kind of man who could contemplate matrimony only
under conditions of supreme possession, mental as well as physical. What
his wife learnt of life he must be the one to teach her; there must be
no knowledge, no memory in her heart of which he might have reason to
feel jealous in the most remote degree. There was something of the
Sultan in his nature.
Perhaps he was not actively conscious of the stringency of his attitude
towards the female sex; now, at least, he merely felt that he had
"struck" the very kind of girl he should care to marry, and he harboured
no manner of doubt in his mind but that Rafella Forte was all she