Love, sudden, overpowering oriental love consumed the man, passion scorched his soul, and desire shook him from his dark head to the slender feet.

He was awake and the girl was asleep, and craving to set his seal upon her in her unconsciousness, he bent towards her until the fierceness of his breath disturbed the lacey frill about her breast, bringing to view the jewel suspended from a golden chain.

Instantly his joined hands were raised towards his face mechanically in prayer, his eyes burned with the fanaticism of his creed, and his face became old in knowledge.

The dividing line? the lifted veil?  Nay! nothing but a jewel with the form and the colouring of a cat’s-eye, which had cunningly winked up at him from the secret places of the girl’s bosom; so that she returned to her cabin with her body unscathed, and her soul on the edge of the precipice.

And the most razor-tongued, detested colonel mem-sahib of the line in India thanked her stars that the mosquitoes had roused her frantically, but just in time, to see the trailing edge of Leonie’s indecorous night attire disappear through the door.

Aloofness, allied to perfect shoes and silken hose, will find a woman more enemies on board than all the pretty faces and frocks in the world; and if, in addition, she can heap on such items as a seductive face and figure; and if gossip via the newspapers can and does supply information as to the contents of her pass-book, plus savoury rumours concerning mysterious incidents in her past; well! ’twere better for that woman to stop at home, bob her hair, and take to that field of literature which is not bound on any side by the hedge of convention.

So it came about that her friends, after stumbling up the gangway at the Kidderpore Docks, with handkerchiefs held against their noses to protect them from the effluvia wafted from Garden Reach, lifted their eyebrows slightly at the frostiness of the adieux between their guest and her fellow-passengers.

And no one in the scramble and flurry noticed the elderly pock-marked ayah who had been engaged as Leonie’s bodywoman as she lifted the hem of the mem-sahib’s skirt and laid it against her forehead, and touched the instep of the high caste native when he passed behind the girl and disappeared in the crowd of his countrymen which opened up a way before him.

An ayah, who, to the utter astonishment of her friends, had given up the high position of head body-woman to a Ranee of the North, in order to accept the humble post of ayah to a mem-sahib.

A post she had gained by the baffling methods of the East which bind each man’s work to that of his neighbour with an unbreakable, untraceable chain; and gained too, over the sleek heads of many of her sister ayahs, who, armed with countless and phenomenally laudatory chits, had squatted patiently for hours in the servants’ quarters of the bungalow at Alipore.