He gathered up the unconscious girl as tenderly as a woman, oh! a good deal more so, and turning her face to his shoulder, carried her out of the temple; stopping for a second to hold her more securely in his left arm as he bent to pick up something which glittered in the moonlight:  a piece of orange silk heavily embroidered in silver, for which Leonie had ransacked the Old, the New, and the Lal Bazaars; a bit of her ayah’s sari torn and caught in a sundri breather.  “And she stayed behind on the boat,” said Jan to himself, with a flash of inspiration as he turned the thing over in his hand, and slipped it into his pocket.

And though his heart ached over his beloved’s mental and physical distress, he inwardly rejoiced at the untoward occurrences of the day which had supplied his solid, trustworthy brain with the outline of a key to the problem.

Dear, stolid old Jan, who, given the time, could beat anyone at unravelling the hardest, hard-tied, knotted problem.

With a tale of sudden faintness he gave her into the care of Edna Talbot, who cooed and fluttered over her like the woman she was, in spite of her workmanlike appearance and her outrageous craving for a big meal.  And she herded the sahibs to the far end of the court, where lay the sick man, after the big meal in which Leonie had joined right heartily; a little white about the face, truly, and shadowed about the eyes, but normal and content, with not the vaguest recollection of what had happened after the killing of the tiger.

“Oh! don’t be dense,” Edna Talbot said quite brusquely when Guy Dean, having brutally ignored the suffering native, suggested returning to the others.  “You surely don’t want to make a triangle.”

“Triangle—­what!”

“Well, you know the old saying about two being company, don’t you?”

“Of course I do—­that’s where it comes in,” replied the lad not over lucidly, “I want to make the two!”

The major laughed at the rueful countenance, as he clapped the boy on the shoulder.

“You’ll get over it all right, old fellow; it’s just like inoculation, a feeble taste of something which might have been ever so much worse.  Trust me, you’ll get over it!”

“Never!” stoutly maintained young Dean as he heaved a stone at something which fled across the court, his mental vision failing to register a picture of the future in which Jill Wetherbourne, daughter of Molly and Jack, occupied the principal position.

Later, Leonie, sitting with Jan Cuxson on a block of fallen masonry, smiled sweetly upon the head shikari, who, salaaming, prayed her to honour him by accepting a little memento of the shikar which had terminated so successfully upon the slaying of the tiger.

In his open palm he held two small bones about two and a half inches in length, two little superstitious tokens which ensure sons to the woman who treasures them, and which, he told her in his broken English, were only found in the tiger, one on each side of the chest, unconnected with any other bone at all.