She knew things which made her interesting to Alec Osborn, who had a bullet head and a cruel lower jaw, despite a degree of the ordinary good looks.  The fact that his chances were good for becoming Marquis of Walderhurst and taking her home to a life of English luxury and splendour was a thing she never forgot.  It haunted her in her sleep.  She had often dreamed of Oswyth Castle and of standing amidst great people on the broad lawns her husband had described feelingly during tropical days when they had sat together panting for breath.  When there had been mention made of the remote, awful possibility that Walderhurst might surrender to the siege laid to him, she had turned sick at the thought.  It made her clench her hands until the nails almost pressed into the skin of her palms.  She could not bear it.  She had made Osborn burst into a big, harsh laugh one day when she had hinted to him that there were occult things to be done which might prevent ill luck.  He had laughed first and scowled afterwards, cynically saying that she might as well be working them up.

He had not come out to India followed by regrets and affection.  He had been a black sheep at home, and had rather been hustled away than otherwise.  If he had been a more admirable kind of fellow, Walderhurst would certainly have made him an allowance; but his manner of life had been such as the Marquis had no patience with in men of any class, and especially abhorred in men whom the accident of birth connected with good names.  He had not been lavish in his demonstrations of interest in the bullet-headed young man.  Osborn’s personableness was not of a kind attractive to the unbiassed male observer.  Men saw his cruel young jowl and low forehead, and noticed that his eyes were small.  He had a good, swaggering military figure to which uniform was becoming, and a kind of animal good looks which would deteriorate early.  His colour would fix and deepen with the aid of steady daily drinking, and his features would coarsen and blur, until by the time he was forty the young jowl would have grown heavy and would end by being his most prominent feature.

While he had remained in England, Walderhurst had seen him occasionally, and had only remarked and heard unpleasant things of him,—­a tendency to selfish bad manners, reckless living, and low flirtation.  He once saw him on the top of a bus with his arm round the waist of an awful, giggling shop-girl kind of person, who was adorned with tremendous feathers and a thick fringe coming unfrizzled with the heat and sticking out here and there in straight locks on her moist forehead.  Osborn thought that the arm business had been cleverly managed with such furtiveness that no one could see it, but Walderhurst was driving solemnly by in his respectable barouche, and he found himself gazing through his monocle directly at his relative, and seeing, from the street below, the point at which the young man’s arm lost itself under the profusely