India is certainly a most dusty land, but a traveller can keep his railway compartment and boots spotless by distributing a few pice to the dusky, cheery youngsters, who, salaaming, solicit the favour of using boot polish, or floor brush, to the mutual benefit of self and the sahib.  Leonie, therefore, felt no repugnance when, clutching the table with her left hand, she made a long arm and secured the book, which proved to be a guide to India’s most famous beauty spots.

She turned the leaves casually and laughed.

“Why!  I’d completely forgotten it,” she said aloud, turning the book sideways to look at an illustration.  “The wonderful tomb Guy Dean insisted upon my visiting if I ever went to Benares.  How beautiful!  Must be the tomb of some ancestor of that young prince he was talking about.  Oh! how beautiful, and—­oh! how helpful!  I suppose some Englishman must have left the book in the train by mistake.”

She had picked up a bit of paper which had fallen from the book; a rough time-table with directions in English as to the best means of getting to the world-famed monument.

“That decides it,” she said sleepily as she switched off the light, pulled a miniature mosquito net, deftly arranged by the ayah, over her head, and the sheet up to her neck.  “We get to the station to-morrow—­sometime—­disembark—­put luggage into cloak-room—­find elephant and—­and dak bungalow—­and—­oh! almost full moon—­how—­how delicious—–­ride out and see the—­the——­”

She slept, oblivious of the fact that she was carrying out implicitly the programme mapped out for her.

Travelling in India is real sport when the train doors are likely to swing open at no given spot, soft-footed natives to enter surreptitiously and disappear as quietly upon sight of your open eyes; and guards to clamour for your ticket, while a mob collects outside your door at the junction to look at the pretty unveiled mem-sahib awakened from her slumber by a dignified bearer with his offering of chotar hazri, which means the thrice blessed early tea-tray.

Her restless spirit was soothed by the rush of the train through the endless plain; strange scenes, strange sights wrenched her mind from the terrible question everlastingly throbbing in her brain; and her eye was not quick enough to distinguish one delicate oval face from another, or to notice that at each stopping place her ayah meandered down the length of the train to a compartment where, in consequence of his high caste and rank, a man sat utterly alone—­unconcerned and totally oblivious of the screaming, chattering crowd upon the platform, of beggars, pilgrims, and bona fide native travellers.

True, for one moment at the station where she alighted for the world-famed tomb, she glanced back hurriedly at a native who placed himself between her and an unsightly epileptic; and she looked back once again as her intuition rapped out a message she did not grasp, and her ayah suddenly besought her help with the coolies.