“Did your parents have you taught your remarkable English?”

“The mem-sahib is too kind to inquire.”

In India you do not show curiosity about your servants’ private affairs or their families, it is not expected, it is not understood; and at the silence which followed the answer Leonie, feeling herself rebuked, rose from the table, and walked out on to the verandah to hide the colour which swept her face from chin to brow.

In the middle of the night, when suddenly and unaccountably aroused from a restless doze, she spoke sharply as her eyes rested on a white figure prone upon the floor in the reflected light of the moon.

“Bearer!”

Her voice was indignant, and the man with one movement rose to his feet and salaamed.

“What do you mean by sleeping in my room?”

Dear heaven, how he loved her as she sat like an image of wrath behind the mosquito net with the sheet pulled up to her neck.

“There are three doors to the mem-sahib’s bedroom, and as the blinds fit badly, except for the presence of her servant, there is nothing to prevent a pariah dog, a jackal, or a thief from entering.”

“Please leave my room and sleep somewhere else.  I do not like it, and I am quite safe.”

Leonie, feeling acutely the want of dignity in her bunched-up attitude, did not know what to say when the man refused suavely, but point-blank, to leave her.

“I regret that I cannot obey, as the mem-sahib is in my care, and I am responsible for her safety; but until the day breaks I will keep watch at the foot of the bed where the mem-sahib’s eyes cannot rest upon her servant!”

Oh!  Leonie!  Leonie!  With that strange, angry, and unaccounted-for mark still upon your shoulder, if only you knew what a fuss you were making over nothing.

But she said thank you quite nicely when chotar hazri was placed beside her bed in the early morning, to the refreshing sound of water being heaved into the tin bath in the dressing-room.

CHAPTER XLIV

  “If thou faintest in the day of adversity,
  thy strength is small.”—­The Bible.

Jan Cuxson was walking round and round the ruined chamber, pausing at the doors as he passed them to look out at the seemingly never-ending jungle; he would have reminded any onlooker of some caged beast as he went monotonously round and round.

He was rather a desperate sight, too, with harassed eyes in a gaunt face, and his open shirt exposing a somewhat emaciated chest; not that he had been starved, far from it; but eat you ever so heartily, fill your interior with all the fatty substances, real or artificial, in the world, worry will push in your cheek and temple, draw canals of woe from your nose to your mouth, and force your cheek-bone, nose, and ribs into high relief.

Of course he ought to have had a many days’ growth of beard all over the face; but, owing to one particular fad, he had not; and thank goodness! for it would have been simply appalling to have had to end the book with the hero looking like a woolly hearthrug.