Suddenly he took a firm resolve, perhaps a dangerous one; not dangerous though if his men had really gone through.

“Gulab,” he said,—­and with his hand he turned her face up by the chin till their eyes were close together,—­“if the two bore a message for me, and it was stolen, I would be like that one you loved was lost.”

The beautiful face swung from his palm and he could hear her gasping.

“You know something?” he said, and he caressed the smooth black tresses.

“I did not see them, Sahib.”

They rode in silence for half a mile and then she said, “Perhaps, Sahib, Bootea can help you—­if the message is lost.”

“And you will, girl?”

“I will, Sahib; even if I die for doing it, I will.”

His arm tightened about her with a shrug of assuring thankfulness, and she knew that this man trusted her and was not sorry of her burden.  Little child-dreams floated through her mind that the silver-faced moon would hang there above and light the world forever,—­for the moon was the soul of the god Purusha whose sacrificed body had created the world,—­and that she would ride forever in the arms of this fair-faced god, and that they were both of one caste, the caste that had as mark the sweet pain in the heart.

And Barlow was sometimes dropping the troubled thought of the missing order and the turmoil that would be in the Council of the Governor General when it became known, to mutter inwardly:  “By Jove! if the chaps get wind of this, that I carried the Gulab throughout a moonlit night, there’ll be nothing for me but to send in my papers.  I’ll be drawn;—­my leg’ll be pulled.”  And he reflected bitterly that nothing on earth, no protestation, no swearing by the gods, would make it believed as being what it was.  He chuckled once, picturing the face of the immaculate Elizabeth while she thrust into him a bodkin of moral autopsy, should she come to know of it.

Bootea thought he had sighed, and laying her slim fingers against his neck said, “The Sahib is troubled.”

“I don’t care a damn!” he declared in English, his mind still on the personal trail.

Seeing that she, not understanding, had taken the sharp tone as a rebuke, he said, “If I had been alone, Gulab, I’d have been troubled sorely, but perhaps the gods have sent you to help out.”

“Ah, yes, God pulled our paths together.  And if Bootea is but a sacrifice that will be a favour, she is happy.”

If the girl had been of a white race, in her abandon of love she would have laid her lips against his, but the women of Hind do not kiss.

The big plate of burnished silver slid, as if pushed by celestial fingers, across the azure dome toward the loomed walls of the Ghats that it would cross to dip into the sea, the Indian Ocean, and mile upon mile was picked from the front and laid behind by the grey as he strode with untiring swing toward his bed that waited on the high plateau of Poona.