felt a queer, unaccustomed thrill travel from the nape of his neck to his boots, pausing by the way at his heart. It was an unusual method of introduction, certainly; yet somehow it relieved the shyness which generally beset him at such functions. He found himself looking frankly into the bronze eyes, and something in them made him say, almost involuntarily:--
"That was rather a jolly way of beginning to be friends. I mean--" The shyness came back with a rush; he blundered horribly.
"Very," put in the girl, interrupting him quite simply. "I hope it will be peace. I always hope that. You know I am a missionary."
"Oh," he replied, blankly. "Yes, there are a lot of you--I mean--of them, in Eshwara, aren't there?"
Her face set suddenly, her mouth grew almost stern. "Not enough, Mr. Carlyon; not half enough," she replied. And the militant ring of her voice, belying the peaceful professions of the previous moment, made him look at her curiously, recognizing that he had touched some quivering nerve of mind. "If you knew Eshwara as I know it," she went on, passionately, "you would say so too; I'm sure you would."
The bronze eyes, meeting his blue ones, though they gave nothing back but kindly, almost boyish, surprise, seemed satisfied. She turned suddenly and stretched her right hand over the river which slipped oilily past the wall below, as they stood beside the balustrade of the loggia. "Look!" she said, impulsively. "Do you see that straight white thing floating down the curve of the current yonder? It isn't a log; those others are; plenty of logs come down the rivers from the forests in the hills, for they don't catch all, you know, at the government wood-station. And so the people here catch the runaways in the backwater, and get paid for them. But that--" She paused and her other hand gripped the balustrade hard; then she turned back to him with a faint apology. "Why should I bother you? Let us talk of something else. There is no reason why I should talk of these things to you so soon, or, indeed, at all."
"I'd rather you did," he put in quickly. It was the truth. A sudden curiosity had come to him, a sudden desire to know more, to think more. He was less of a boy than he had been five minutes before. "I--I hope you will," he added; "really I do--I--I--" He felt his manhood as he had never felt it before, and yet, in a way, he was more forgetful of it. The girl opposite him was womanhood incarnate to him, and yet, in some mysterious way, beyond it, above it.
"You and I must be about the same age, I expect," he said, with a half-perplexed frown, "but you have seen a lot more than I have. I wish you'd tell me, please!"
The straight white glint in the water was just disappearing behind one of those balconies overhanging the river, where there was only room for a pair of lovers.
"It is a dead girl, Mr. Carlyon," she said in a low voice. "She was in my school. Her people were very bigoted--Brahmins in a temple--but they let her be taught to read, because she was betrothed to an educated man. Last year she was married--she was but a child still--and I have only seen her once or twice since. Then"--the voice paused a second. "She was very frightened, poor little Premi, at what was coming. 'I shall die, Miss-sahib, I shall surely die,' she said to me the very last time I saw her; so I promised--I am a medical missionary, Mr. Carlyon. But when the time came, they would not let me in. I--I went to the husband--he is an educated man--you may have heard of him--Rama-nund, a great speaker,--he writes, too, and all that--but he said he was helpless with the women; and I am not sure either if he wished it himself--they don't know their own minds. So poor little Premi and her baby--Oh!" she broke off with an infinite pain in her voice--"it is so hard--so hard for both."
Her face, set riverwards, was soft, yet stern; full of fight, yet full of pity, and Lance thought of a virgin martyr in the illustrated 'Lives of the Saints' with which his grandmother, Lady Carewe, had been wont to still his boyish unrest on Sunday afternoons. Yet there was something beyond that self-concentrated devotion in this face; something that took him back further still to the days when he had sobbed out his childish hurts in his mother's arms.
"She was ill all yesterday and the day before--they told me there was no hope of either--they just let them die. And they always put them in the river--they have iron rings round their wrists and ankles to prevent them coming back to harm the men--" She paused and turned to Lance swiftly. "Isn't it true that there are not enough of us--that we want more women to teach them what--"
"But I does!" came a high childish treble, forcing itself irresistibly even on the attention of these two; "I 'ikes 'oo twenty 'fowsand times better than dad, an' I 'ikes Captain Dering ten 'fowsand times better too; an' so does 'mum--don't 'oo mummie?"
It was little Gladys Smith, who, clasping both Dr. Dillon's hands in hers, had swung herself back from him so as to toss her fair curls from her laughing face, as she looked up at him mutinously.
There was an instant's awkward pause, during which the eyes of a man and woman met for a second. Met and parted hastily; but not before the girl with the yellow silk sash, who stood between them, had looked from one to the other with a dim surprise unclosing her red lips, and showing the gleam of her white teeth between them.
Then Dr. Dillon said, carelessly, "And you like Akbar Khân better than any of us, you young sinner, because he gives you sweeties! Here! Akbar Khân, bring the Missy-baba some cream toffee!"
The old pantaloon, who, with his loose coatee removed and a white duster tucked into Saturn's waist-ring was now helping to hand round coffee and cake, capered up with a voluble, but toothless,--
"Ger-reeb--pun-wâz!" (Protector of the Poor.)
Gladys helped herself discriminately, staring at the old servitor the while. "But I don't 'ike Akbar Khân. Do I, son of an owl?" she continued superbly, in the accurate Urdu which comes so daintily from lisping English babies. "Did I not say I would hate thee because thou wouldst not tell me why thou didst prostrate thyself before the soldier in the courtyard? And the ayah laughed, the base-born! She knew also, and would not say, and so did the soldier; so I hate you all!"
She stamped her little foot, and shook her curls defiantly.
"Gladys!" cried her mother, reproachfully.
"Hullo! What's all this about?" laughed Captain Dering, catching the child up in his arms. "One of my soldiers insulting you? Who was it?" He turned, with the absolute command of his race, to the be-ringed one, who stood, full of deprecatory mumblings and salaamings, his hands, holding the tray of sweets, trembling visibly.
"Who was it, Khân-jee?" asked Father Ninian, in a curiously even tone; one which, nevertheless, seemed a compelling one, for a murmured name came rapidly, followed by eager explanations.
Father Ninian frowned, and deliberately put on the gold pince-nez which always hung around his neck. He seldom used it, however, being, he would say playfully, in his native Scotch, too "well acquaint" with Eshwara and all in it to need such help after fifty years experience. So it had come to be an unfailing sign that he was face to face with something unexpected, something new. Naturally, therefore, it changed the character of his face, bringing back to it a strange look of youth; of hope and energy--the look of choice which age has not.
"Roshan Khân," he echoed, "why comes he here?" Then in sudden recollection he turned to Vincent Dering. "Of course, he comes with you. I knew he was in your regiment, but I did not think."
Captain Dering put down the child gently. "Is there any reason, sir," he asked decisively, "why he should not be here? If so--"
Father Ninian took off his eye-glasses slowly. He was back on familiar ground. "No!" he said, with a smile and a shrug of the shoulders; "none. He is welcome to come if he likes. He is a fine soldier, Captain
