“It is a charm, O!  Mem Sahib, defender of the poor, which will assuredly bring you happiness.

“And may the sons of the sahib grow straight as the pine tree,” he added slowly in his own tongue, as he felt the sahib’s eyes fixed steadily upon him.

“What did he say to you, Jan?”

As the shikari turned away Cuxson caught the girl’s hands and crushed them up against his heart.

“I will tell you some day!”

“Tell me now!”

“No! not now!  It is of love that I should have to speak, and in all these past weeks you have not let me touch your hand or speak to you of love.  You have put a barrier between us, a barrier of a misplaced fear, which has grown higher and stronger since I have had to confess to failure in finding any trace of your old servant.  India is wide, dear, and its villages uncountable, and I am not distressed over the empty return of these last months; all that worries me is, that while prowling about the Himalayas out of reach of the post, I never knew what had happened to you, or that you were in India.”

Leonie sighed as she opened her hand and looked at the small bones.

“Tell me now, Jan!” she insisted.

“No!  Leonie, I cannot.  There will be no one near us when I do tell you, and except as a souvenir of that very fine old man, you need not keep them, because my love is a still greater and surer charm to bring you the great happiness they promise.”

CHAPTER XXXII

  “And thou shalt become an astonishment,
  a proverb, a byword.”—­The Bible.

When Leonie returned to Calcutta she found that the tale of her courageous act which had preceded her, and of which home and local papers had exhausted themselves in praise, had not served to endear her to that little white community, which suffers from social myopia, and the self-adjusted chains of what it most mistakenly calls caste.

Not likely that the feminine members of Jute, military, railway, or law circles would open their arms any wider to this young, and beautiful, widowed creature with the mop of naturally curling hair, now that, if so minded, she could verbally and positively flap one of the finest tiger skins that had ever come out of Bengal in their heat-stricken faces.

In fact some of the young ones as they wrestled with the nightly problem of their own dank, straight particular bit of woman’s glory, would doubtless, if questioned, have upheld the Hindu custom of completely shaving the widowed head.

Many, in fact, had been the meetings of these younger mem-sahibs in bungalows, or flats, at Firpoes, or in clubs, where, under the pretext of criticising the latest fashions from overseas, they discussed the pros and cons of accepting this person into the haven of their Anglo-Indian bosom.

The elder ones kept out of the clatter, having suffered and fought in similar crises in their own day as had their mothers, and their mothers’ mothers before them since the days before the mutiny; being moreover resigned to the corrugated appearance of their faces, and the, in consequence, perambulatory instincts of their lords.