The dead husband’s mother, had Bootea come of an age to live with him, though yet but a child of twelve years, would, on the slightest provocation, beat her—­even brand her with a hot iron; he had known of it having been done.  She would be given but one meal a day—­rice and chillies.  Even if she had not yet left her father’s house he would look upon her as a shameful thing, an undesirable member of the family, one not to be rid of again in the way of marriage; for if a Hindu married her it would break his caste—­he would be a veritable pariah.  No servant would serve him; no man would sell him anything; if he kept a shop no one would buy of him; no one would sit and speak with him—­he would be ostracised.

The only life possible for the girl would be that of a prostitute.  She might be married by the temple priests to the god Khandoka, as thousands of widows had been, and thus become a nun of the temple, a prostitute to the celibate priests.  Knowing all this, and that Bootea was what she was, her face and eyes holding all that sweetness and cleanness, that she lived in the guardianship of Ajeet Singh, very much a man, Barlow admired her the more in that she had escaped moral destruction.  Her face was the face of one of high caste; she was not like the ordinary nautch girl of the fourth caste.  Everything about Bootea suggested breeding, quality.  The iron bracelet, indicated why she had socially passed down the scale—­there was no doubt about it.

“I understand, Gulab,” he said; “the Sahibs all understand, and know that widowhood is not a reproach.”

“But the Sahib questioned of love; and how can one such know of love?  The heart starves and does not grow for it feeds upon love—­what we of Hind call the sweet pain in the heart.”

“But have none been kind, Gulab—­pleased by your flower face, has no one warmed your heart?”

The slim arms that gripped Barlow in a new tightening trembled, the face that fled from the betraying moonlight was buried against his tunic, and the warm body quivered from sobs.

Barlow turned her face up, and the moonlight showed vagrant pearls that lay against the olive cheeks, now tinted like the petals of a rose.  Then from a service point of view, and as a matter of caste, Barlow went ghazi.  He drooped his head and let his lips linger against the girl’s eyes, and uttered a superb common-place:  “Don’t cry, little girl,” he said; “I am seven kinds of a brute to bother you!”

And Bootea thought it would have been better if he had driven a knife into her heart, and sobbed with increased bitterness.  Once her fingers wandered up searchingly and touched his throat.

Barlow casting about for the wherefore of his madness, discovered the moonlight, and heard the soft night-air whispering through the harp chords of trees that threw a tracery of black lines across the white road; and from a grove of mango trees came the gentle scent of their blossoms; and he remembered that statistics had it that there was but one memsahib to so many square miles in that land of expatriation; and he knew that he was young and full of the joy of life; that a British soldier was not like a man of Hind who looked upon women as cattle.