With one supreme effort the tiger reared itself on its hind legs, gave a choking, strangled cough ending in a spurt of blood and froth which drenched Leonie, and fell back dead; and the entire native staff, shouting in wonder and joy, tore across the clearing and prostrated themselves, in grateful layers around the girl’s heavily booted feet.

CHAPTER XXXI

  “For her house inclineth unto death!”—­The Bible.

We lie beneath the mosquito net, we undress behind the purdah, we sit on the verandah, or stroll in the compound; we dance, we ride, we eat, we sleep, ever heedless of the eyes watching, and of the hidden form; but above all of that relentless will which causes some of us uncontrollably to do odd things at odd moments under the Indian stars, to our subsequent disgust and wonderment.

Leonie, with Jan Cuxson behind her, stopped outside the temple door, which, hanging upon one hinge, moved slowly to and fro in the night breeze.

And at the side of the altar, in the black shadows of the doorway which led to the secret places of the temple, a pock-marked native woman, draped in an orange coloured sari embroidered in silver, laid one hand upon the priest’s arm and pointed with the other.

“Behold the Sahib,” she whispered with a snarl of hate at the corners of her mouth, stained crimson with betel juice.  “He who seeks her in wife,” she continued, pushing the sari back from about her head so that the thirteen silver rings she wore in her crumpled left ear tinkled faintly, and her nose-ring of gold set with small but real turquoise gleamed dully, “and once wedded she will return across the Black Water.  O father of the people, O wise one, I love her and thou didst promise.”

She suddenly beat her breast, and the heavy silver bracelets jingled faintly, then shrank back against the painted wall as a young man, even the jungle guide, and beautiful to the verge of unseemliness, stealing from the shadows, smote her fiercely across the mouth, and pulled the sari roughly over her head.

“Hold thy peace and watch,” he whispered, with a swift movement of the arm, most suggestive of a cobra uncoiling itself with intent to strike, as Leonie turned away from the doorway with a shudder.

She took two steps and stopped irresolute, with the rays of the full moon shining upon her upturned perplexed face.

Then she stared down at the myriad things which crawled and hopped in and out of the gleaming bones which lay about in little heaps, or scattered in ones and twos, even up to the door and into the dim interior.

Too absorbed, neither Jan nor Leonie noticed the murmur of voices from the far end of the court, nor the reek of the tiger’s blood which came from her stained dress and the carcase of the dead beast which was in the process of being skinned, and around which hovered the native staff awaiting the distribution of the coveted tiger’s fat.