Courteney did not answer.  The stiffness was spreading.  He felt as one turned to stone.  Mechanically he yielded to the hand upon his arm, not speaking, scarcely thinking.

And then—­almost before he knew it—­he was in her presence, face to face with the golden vision that had caught and—­for a space at least—­had held his heart.

He bowed, still silent, still strangely bound and fettered by the compelling force.

A hand that was lithe and slender and oddly boyish came out to him.  A voice that had in it sweet, lilting notes, like the voice of a laughing child, spoke his name.

“Mr. Courteney!  How kind!” it said.

As from a distance he heard Grant speak.  “Mr. Courteney, allow me to introduce you—­my wife!”

There was a dainty movement like the flash of shimmering wings.  He looked up.  She had thrown back her veil.

He gazed upon her.  “Rosemary!”

She looked back at him above the roses with eyes that were deeply purple—­as the depths of the sea.  “Yes, I am Rosemary—­to my friends,” she said.

Ellis Grant was laughing still, in his massive, contented way.  “But to her lover,” he said, “she is—­and always has been—­Rosa Mundi.”

Then speech came back to Courteney, and strength returned.  He held himself in firm restraint.  He had been stricken, but he did not flinch.

“Your husband?” he said.

She indicated Grant with a careless hand.  “Since yesterday,” she said.

He bowed to her again, severely formal.  “May I wish you joy?” he said.

There was an instant’s pause, and in that instant something happened.  She had not moved.  Her eyes still met his own, but it was as if a veil had dropped between them suddenly.  He saw the purple depths no more.

“Thank you,” said Rosa Mundi, with her little girlish laugh.

* * * * *

As he strode down the Pier a few minutes later, he likened the scent of the crushed roses that strewed the way to the fumes of sacrifice—­sacrifice offered at the feet of a goddess who cared for nothing sacred.  Not till long after did he remember the tears that he had seen her shed.

A Debt of Honour

I

HOPE AND THE MAGICIAN

They lived in the rotten white bungalow at the end of the valley—­Hope and the Magician.  It stood in a neglected compound that had once been a paradise, when a certain young officer belonging to the regiment of Sikhs then stationed in Ghantala had taken it and made of it a dainty home for his English bride.  Those were the days before the flood, and no one had lived there since.  The native men in the valley still remembered with horror that awful night when the monsoon had burst in floods and water-spouts upon the mountains, and the bride, too terrified to remain in the bungalow, had set out in the worst fury of the storm to find her husband, who was on duty up at the cantonments.  She had been drowned close to the bungalow in a ranging brown torrent which swept over what a few hours earlier had been a mere bed of glittering sand.  And from that time the bungalow had been deserted, avoided of all men, a haunted place, the abode of evil spirits.