But, when she turned her head, the sight of her hurrying escort perspiring in her wake—­(few natives like the heat and wind one whit better than their conquerors)—­filled her with an unexpected, probably unjustifiable, determination not to let them see her flinch at any kind of horror.  That was the spirit of sahibdom that is not always quite commendable; it is the spirit that takes Anglo-Saxon women to the seething, stenching plains and holds them there high-chinned to stiffen their men-folk by courageous example, but it leads, too, to things not quite so womanly and good.

“I’ll show them!” muttered Rosemary McClean, wiping the blown dust from her eyes and facing the wind again that now began to carry with it the unspread taint—­the awful, sickening, soul-revolting smell inseparable from Hindoo funeral rites.  There were three pyres, low-smouldering, close by the river-bank, and men stirred with long poles among the ashes to make sure that the incineration started the evening before should be complete; there was one pyre that looked as though it had been lit long after dawn—­another newly lit—­and there were two pyres building.

It was those two new ones that held her attention, and finally decided her to hold her course.  She wanted to make sure.  The smell of burning —­the unoutlined, only guessed-at ghastliness—­would probably have killed her courage yet, before she came close enough to really see; but the suspicion of a greater horror drew her on, as snakes are said to draw birds on, by merely being snakes, and with red-rimmed eyes smarting from smoke as well as wind she pressed forward.

The ghats were deserted-looking, for the funeral rites of those who burned were practically over until the time should come to scatter ashes on the river-surface; only a few attendants hovered close to the fires to prod them and occasionally throw on extra logs.  Only round the two new pyres not yet quite finished was anything approaching a crowd assembled, and there a priest was officiously directing the laying of the logs.  It was the manner of their laying and the careful building of a scaffold on each side of either pyre that held Rosemary McClean’s attention—­called all the rebellious womanhood within her to interfere—­and drew her nearer.

Soon the priest noticed her—­a cotton-skirted wraith amid the smoke —­and shouted to the guards behind; one of them answered, laughing coarsely, and Rosemary understood enough of the dialect he used to grit her teeth with shame and anger.  The men left off building, and, directed by the priest, came toward her in a ragged line to cut her off from closer approach; she stood, then—­examined the new pyres as carefully as she could—­walked to another vantage-point and viewed them sideways—­then turned her back.

“Oh, the brutes!” she ejaculated.  There were tears in her voice, as well as helpless anger.  “There is not one devil, there are a million, and they all live here!”