But there were other men, like William Brown, who were a shade too honest and too stiff-chinned to buckle under to the social conditions of England in those days, and who were consequently not exactly pestered with offers of employment.  And a man who could see the difference between doffing his ragged cap to a dissolute squire or parson, and saluting his better on parade, could also see the selfishness of leaving an honest girl to languish for him.  Brown could not get a living in England.  So he told his girl to get a better man, swung his canvas bag across his shoulder and marched away.

“What kind of a man is a better man than Bill?” she had wondered.  Men like Bill seem to have a knack of judging character, and of picking girls who are as steadfast as themselves.  So it is not to be wondered at that almost before her tears were dry she had set about attempting what few women of her type and time would have dreamed of.  If Bill had set her free, she reasoned, Bill had no more authority over her, and she might do exactly what she chose.  Bill could release, but he could not make her take another man.  So, for all that the local yeomen, and local tradesmen even, haunted the little cottage on the Downs, and pestered her with their attentions, no one supplanted Bill.

Bill could tell her—­and had told her—­that India was no country for a white woman; that there were snakes there, and black men and tigers and even worse.  But, since he had set her free, if she could manage it she was quite at liberty to brave the tigers and the snakes.  And, once there, she would see whether she was free or not, and whether Bill was, either!

It took Bill Brown six years of constant honest effort to become a sergeant.  It took Jane Emmett six weeks of pride-consuming and vexatious vigilance to procure for herself a job as nurse in a soldier-family.  And it took her six more years of unremitting diligence, sweetened by all the attributes that seem desirable when nursing other people’s children and embittered by the shame of grudging patronage, before she was considered dependable enough to be recommended for the service of a family just leaving for Bengal.  Then, however, her world was a real world again!

Five months on a sailing-ship around the Cape—­deep-laden, gunwales awash in a beam—­on Bay-of-Biscay “snorer,” hove-to for a week off Cape Agul—­has, while the clumsy brigantine rolled the masts loose in her, all but dismasted in a typhoon come astray from the China Sea, fed on moldy bread, and even moldier pork, with a fretful child to nurse, and an exacting mother to be pleased!  Jane Emmett laughed at it.  Bill had been there before her, and had done more on his way, and worse Bengal did not frighten her.  Nor did the knowledge, when she reached it, that Bill was very likely still some hundreds of miles away.  She, who had come five thousand miles as the crows are said to fly and nine thousand by the map, could manage the odd hundreds.  And she could wait.  She had waited six long years.  What was another month or two?