“It must end,” she answered.  “You know that as well as I.”

“I don’t know it.  I won’t know it,” he replied.  He reached out his hand towards hers, but she was too quick for him.  He bent nearer to her.

“Violet,” he whispered, “marry me!”

Violet Oliver glanced again to the courtyard.  But it was no longer to assure herself that friends of her own race were comfortably near at hand.  Now she was anxious that they should not be near enough to listen and overhear.

“That’s impossible!” she answered in a startled voice.

“It’s not impossible!  It’s not!” And the desperation in his voice betrayed him.  In the depths of his heart he knew that, for this woman, at all events, it was impossible.  But he would not listen to that knowledge.

“Other women, here in India, have had the courage.”

“And what have their lives been afterwards?” she asked.  She had not herself any very strong feeling on the subject of colour.  She was not repelled, as men are repelled.  But she was aware, nevertheless, how strong the feeling was in others.  She had not lived in India for nothing.  Marriage with Shere Ali was impossible, even had she wished for it.  It meant ostracism and social suicide.

“Where should I live?” she went on.  “In Chiltistan?  What life would there be there for me?”

“No,” he replied.  “I would not ask it.  I never thought of it.  In England.  We could live there!” and, ceasing to insist, he began wistfully to plead.  “Oh, if you knew how I have hated these past months.  I used to sit at night, alone, alone, alone, eating my heart for want of you; for want of everything I care for.  I could not sleep.  I used to see the morning break.  Perhaps here and there a drum would begin to beat, the cries of children would rise up from the streets, and I would lie in my bed with my hands clenched, thinking of the jingle of a hansom cab along the streets of London, and the gas lamps paling as the grey light spread.  Violet!”

Violet twisted her hands one within the other.  This was just what she had thought to avoid, to shut out from her mind—­the knowledge that he had suffered.  But the evidence of his pain was too indisputable.  There was no shutting it out.  It sounded loud in his voice, it showed in his looks.  His face had grown white and haggard, the face of a tortured man; his hands trembled, his eyes were fierce with longing.

“Oh, don’t,” she cried, and so great was her trouble that for once she did not choose her words.  “You know that it’s impossible.  We can’t alter these things.”

She meant by “these things” the natural law that white shall mate with white, and brown with brown; and so Shere Ali understood her.  He ceased to plead.  There came a dreadful look upon his face.

“Oh, I know,” he exclaimed brutally.  “You would be marrying a nigger.”

“I never said that,” Violet interrupted hastily.