“The sahib will not believe!  Then will I make her, the white woman, see thee, the man she desires as husband, a prisoner in the House of Kali, covered in blood, and she will hasten forthwith to thee—­and to me!”

Cuxson sprang to his feet with murder in his eyes, but stopped and flung out his hands as though to thrust aside some obstacle.

The priest laughed softly.

“O babe in wisdom!  Behold, thou shalt not be bound, yet shalt thou not stir beyond yon temple wall until she come, and with her the son of princes who yearns for her; then shall I lift my will from thee and tie thee to the wall that thou mayst behold the double sacrifice of love and life made to Kali the Terrible.”

The priest was gone, and Jan Cuxson sat down upon a fallen block of masonry, covering his face with his wounded hands; and faintly from the temple echoed the voice of the priest as he prayed to his god before projecting his will across the space that divided him from the white woman.

Only for a little moment of despondency, and then he sat back and shook his great shoulders with the light of battle in his eyes, and grim determination in every line of the powerful jaw.

How he was going to circumvent the priest and save his beloved he did not know—­he had no plan, but—­he was going to pull it off.

“The son of princes,” he said, addressing a monkey which had flung a stick at him from the top of the wall, “why I’d trust my dear, bewitched or not, with a thousand sons of princes.  I love her and she loves me, you gibbering bit of fur, and d’you think anything could stand against that.  Let her come!  Just let her be within reach of my arms, then you’ll see what you will see.  Let the priest play into my hands, and bring her here, the sooner the better, for that is exactly what I want.”

And he laughed as he refilled his pipe, blessing the old priest for his consideration in annexing naught but his rifle and revolver.

Which is just about the simplest way of starting to get out of a tight corner.

Ignoring all obstacles, owning to no defeat.  The splendid heritage of the English speaking race.

CHAPTER XLII

“A good name is better than precious ointment.”—­The Bible.

“And in its light the Star of Love aglow,
Shone with her beacon fire, a guide
and guardian still.”—­Dante’s Inferno.

In the middle of the night Leonie lay face downwards upon her bed in the great Eastern Hotel.

All the luggage she had brought with her from England was stacked around the small room, and even in the dressing-room; in fact, there was that unfinished, unpacked air about the whole place which is inseparable from anyone in India who is in the throes of going home.

She had returned on the wings of panic from Benares, only to find that the gossip which had been circulated about her had arrived well in advance; and that, like crows after a dust cart, what remained of the city’s female population was busy pulling her to a thousand pieces with claws and beaks sharpened by the million irritations of the hot weather.