“The attar, Sahib?  I love it because it’s gentle.”

“Ah, that’s why you wore the rose that I came by at the nautch?”

“Yes, Sahib.  Though I am Bootea, because of a passion for the rose I am called Gulab.”

“Lovely—­the Rose! that’s just what you are, Gulab.  But the attar is so costly!  Are you a princess in disguise?”

“No, Sahib, but one brought me many bottles of it, the slim, long bottles like a finger; and a drop of it lasts for a moon.”

“Ah, I see,” and Barlow smiled; “you have for lover a raja, the one who brought the attar.”

The figure in the cloak shivered again, but the girl said nothing.  And Barlow, rather to hear her voice, for it was sweet like flute music, chaffed:  “What is he like, the one that you love?  A swaggering tall black-whiskered Rajput, no doubt, with a purple vest embroidered in gold, clanking with tulwar, and a voice like a Brahmini bull—­full of demand.”

The slim arms about his waist tightened a little—­that was all.

“Confess, Gulab, it will pass the time; a love story is sweet, and Brahm, who creates all things, creates flowers beautiful and sweet to stir love,” and he shook the small body reassuringly.

“Sahib, when a girl dances before the great ones to please, it is permitted that she may play at being a princess to win the favour of a raja, and sing the love song to the music of the sitar (guitar), but it is a matter of shame to speak it alone to the Presence.”

“Tell me, Gulab,” and his strong fingers swept the smooth black hair.

The girl unclasped her arms from about Barlow’s waist and led his finger to a harsh iron bracelet upon her arm.

At the touch of the cold metal, iron emblem of a child marriage, a shackle never to be removed, he knew that she was a widow, accounted by Brahminical caste an offence to the gods, an outcast, because if the husband still lived she would be in a zenanna of gloomy walls, and not one who danced as she had at Nana Sahib’s.

“And the man to whom you were bound by your parents died?” he asked.

“I am a widow, Sahib, as the iron bracelet testifies with cold bitterness; it is the badge of one who is outcast, of one who has not become sati, has not sat on the wood to find death in its devouring flame.”

Barlow knew all the false logic, the metaphysical Machiavellians, the Brahmins, advanced to thin out the undesirable females,—­women considered at all times in that land of overpopulation of less value than men,—­by the simple expedient of self-destruction.  He knew the Brahmins’ thesis culled from their Word of God, the Vedas or the Puranas, calculated to make the widow a voluntary, willing suicide.  They would tell Bootea that owing to having been evil in former incarnations her sins had been visited upon her husband, had caused his death; that in a former life she had been a snake, or a rat.