Hodson, almost mechanically, had stretched a hand for them, and when they were opened, and he saw the seal, and realised what they were, some curious guttural sound issued from his lips as if he had waked in affright from a nightmare.  He pulled a drawer of the desk open, took out a cheroot—­and lighted it.  Then he commenced to speak, slowly, droppingly, as one speaks who has suddenly been detected in a crime.  He put a flat hand on the papers, holding them to the desk.  And it was Elizabeth he spoke of at first, as if the thing under his palm, that meant danger to an empire, was subservient.

“Barlow, my boy,” he said, “I’m old, I’m tired.”

The Captain, looking into the drawn face, had a curious feeling that Hodson was at least a hundred.  There was a floaty wonderment in his mind why the fifty-five-years’-service retirement rule had not been enforced in the Colonel’s case.  Then he heard the other’s words.

“I’ve had but two gods, Barlow, the British Raj and Elizabeth; that’s since her mother died.  In a little, a few years more, I will retire with just enough to live on plus my pension—­perhaps in France, where it’s cheap.  And then I’ll still have two gods, Elizabeth and the one God.  And, Captain, somehow I had hoped that you and Elizabeth would hit it off, but I’m afraid she’s made a mistake.”

Barlow had been following this with half his receptivity, for, though he fought against it, the memory of Bootea—­gentle, trusting, radiating love, warmth—­cried out against the bitter unfemininity of the girl who had stabbed his honour and his cleanness.  The black figure of Kali still rested on the table, and somehow the evil lines in the face of the goddess suggested the vindictiveness that had played about the thin lips of his accuser.

And the very plea the father was making was reacting.  It was this, that he, Barlow, was rich, that a chance death or two would make him Lord Barradean, was the attraction, not love.  A girl couldn’t be in love with a man and strive to break him.

Hodson had taken up the papers, and was again scanning them mistily.

“They were on the murdered messenger—­he was killed, wasn’t he, Barlow?”

“Yes.”

“And has any native seen these papers, Captain?”

“No, I cut them from the soles of the sandals the messenger wore, myself, Sir.”

“That is all then, Captain; we have them back—­I may say, thank God!” He stood up and holding out his hand added, “Thank you, Captain.  I don’t want to know anything about the matter—­I’m too much machine now to measure rainbows—­fancy I should wear a strip of red-tape as a tie.”

“If you will listen, Sir—­there is another that I want to put right.  Your daughter did see the Gulab, but because she had brought me the sandals.  And you can take an officer’s word for it that the Gulab is not what Elizabeth believes.”