“Dost think it has been a child’s task to keep my hands and my kisses from thee?  Behold, I had but to make a sign, and thou, in thy unconsciousness, would have come unto my intent!  Oh, thou bud of innocent fragrance; thou fruit ready to the plucking of loving hands!  Aye, thou wert, thou art in my power; and even have I seen thee in——­”

“Ah!” said Leonie sharply as her hand slid to her shoulder and the words came through her closed teeth—­“You lie!”

“Lie!”

“Yes, lie!  You have not touched me you say; neither have you kissed me, but you, and only you, can tell me what the mark is on my shoulder—­a mark I shall carry to my grave.”

The man threw back his turbaned head and was about to make reply, when, with those shrill cries which betray great fear, a troop of monkeys passed them, chattering as they ran swiftly on all fours, or swung even more swiftly from tree to tree; and the native looked after them, and up to the sky, and over his shoulder along the narrow path by which they had come, showing black and white in the alternate lights and shadowings of the moon.

“Answer me!” said Leonie more sharply than she knew, and with a woman’s superb indifference to any event or signs of approaching event outside her own love orbit.

“Nay, answer thou me!” replied the man who, expert in the knowledge of jungle signs, yet put aside all thought save of his love for the woman.  “Tell me that thou wilt be my wife and the mother of my sons, thou beautiful woman!  Tell me that thou wilt come unto me this night, wedded to me, by yon old priest; and that, within the arms of Uma so sweet, of Parvati who steppeth so lightly, I may set my seal upon thee.

“Lifting from thee, as I and the priest only may lift, that which thou callest the curse from about thee, bringing thee to happiness in the shadow of the temple.”

But something had happened to Leonie, bringing her to a pitch of excitement foreign to her in her waking hours.  She looked swiftly to right and left, and over her shoulder, and up the narrow path they must go to the temple; and up to the sky she could see faintly through the trees, and into the eyes of the man watching her intently.  Then she clasped her hands tightly and moved close to him, her face as white as death.

“And the sahib, the white man, where is he?”

The native of India weaves and fashions the cloth of his cloak of love out of many colours.  Gorgeous colours, blinding, dazzling, in which predominate the scarlet of passion and the emerald of the supreme male’s jealousy.  And all, from the sweeper to the highest of birth and caste, wear this wondrous garment in India, though not one out of the teeming millions fashions his cloak upon the pattern of his neighbour’s.

Madhu Krishnaghar, the son of princes, with eyes dimmed by the brilliance of his own particular garment, failed to perceive that Leonie, too, was wrapped in a love mantle.