“Globe-trotters!” suggested Lance.

“Or ‘Piffers’ devoid of reverence!” retorted Roy.  “Hullo!  Here come the others.”

Footsteps and voices in the quadrangle waked hollow echoes as when a stone drops into a well.  Presently they sounded on the stairs near by:  Flossie’s rather boisterous laugh; Martin chaffing her in his husky tones.

“Great sport!  Let’s rent it off H.H. and gather ’em all in from the highways and hedges for a masked fancy ball!”

Roy stood up and squared his shoulders.  “Satyrs dancing, with a vengeance!” said he; but the gleam of Aruna’s sari smote him silent.  A band seemed to tighten round his heart....

* * * * *

Before tea was over, peacocks and pigeons had gone to roost among the trees that shadowed the Lake; and the light behind the hills had passed swiftly from gold to flame-colour, from flame-colour to rose.  For the sun, that had already departed in effect, was now setting in fact.

“Hush—­it’s coming,” murmured Thea:—­and it came.

Hollow thuds, quickening to a vibrant roar, swelled up from the temple in the courtyard below.  The Brahmins were beating the great tom-tom before Kali’s Shrine.

It was the signal.  It startlingly waked the dead city to discordant life.  Groanings and howlings and clashings, as of Tophet, were echoed and re-echoed from every temple, every shrine; an orgy of demoniac sounds; blurred in transit through the empty rooms beneath; pierced at intervals by the undulating wail of ram’s horns; the two reiterate notes wandering, like lost souls, through a confused blare of cymbals and bagpipes and all kinds of music.

Flossie, with a bewitching grimace at Martin, clapped both hands over her ears.  Roy—­standing by the balustrade with Aruna—­was aware of an answering echo somewhere in subconscious depths, as the discords rose and fell above the throbbing undernote of the drum.  It was as if the claimant voices of the East cried out to the blood in his veins:  ’You are of us—­do what you will; go where you will.’  And all the while his eyes never left Aruna’s half-averted face.

Sudden and clear from the heights came a ringing peal of bells, as it were the voices of angels answering the wail of devils in torment.  It was from the little Shrine of Shiva close against the ramparts, etched in outline, above the dark of the hills.

Aruna turned and looked up at him.  “Too beautiful!” she whispered.

He nodded, and flung out an arm.  “Look there!”

Low and immense—­pale in the pallor of the eastern sky—­the moon hung poised above massed shadows, like a wraith escaped from the city of death.  Moment by moment, she drew light from the vanished sun.  Moment by moment, under their watching eyes, she conjured the formless dark into a new heaven, a new earth....

“Would you be afraid—­to stroll round a little ... with me?” he asked.