old, who, pathetically enough, was a great solace to her child-bereft life.
"Yes, Sonny, isn't it lovely?" she said, her slim white hand going out to bring the child closer; "and it screams splendidly. Would you like to hear it scream?"
Sonny, clinging tightly to her fingers, looked doubtful. "Wait till muvver comth, muvver's comin' to zoo esectly. Sonny's always flightened wizout hith muvver."
At which piece of diplomacy, Kate, feeling light-hearted, caught the little white-clad golden-curled figure in her arms and ran out with it into the garden, smothering the laughing face with kisses as she ran.
"Sonny's a little goose to be 'flightened,'" came her glad voice between the laughs and the kisses. "He ought never to be 'flightened' at all, because no one in all the wide, wide world would ever hurt a good little childie like Sonnykins--No one! No one! No one!"
She had sat the little fellow down among the flowers by this time, being, in good sooth, breathless with his weight; and now, continuing the game, chased him with pretense booings of "No one! No one!" about the pansy bed, and so round the sweet peas; until in delicious terror he shrieked with delight, and chased her back between her chasings.
It was a pretty sight, indeed, this game between the woman and the child. The gardener paused in his watering, the tailor at his work; and even the native orderly going his rounds with the brigade order-book grinned broadly, so adding one to the kindly dark faces watching the chasing of Sonny.
"My dear Kate! How can you?" The querulous voice broke in on the booings, and made Mrs. Erlton pause and think of her loosened hair pins. The speaker was a fair, diaphanous woman, the most solid-looking part of whose figure, as she dawdled up the path, was the large white umbrella she carried. "Here am I melting with the heat! What I shall do next year if George is transferred to Delhi, I don't know. He says we shan't be able to afford the hills. And he has the dogcart at some of those eternal court-martials. I wonder why the sepoys give so much trouble nowadays. George says they're spoiled. So I came to see if you'll drive me to the band; though I'm not fit to be seen. I was up half the night with baby. She is so cross, and George will have it she must be ill; as if children didn't have tempers! Lucky you, to have your boy at home. And yet you go romping with other people's. I wouldn't; but then I look horrid when I'm hot."
Kate laughed. She did not, and as she rearranged her hair seemed to have left years of life behind her. "I can't help it," she said. "I feel so ridiculously young myself sometimes--as if I hadn't lived at all, as if nothing belonged to me, and I was really somebody else. As if----" She paused abruptly in her confidences, and, to change the subject, turned to the group behind Mrs. Seymour:--an ayah holding a toddler by the hand, a tall orderly in uniform carrying a year-old baby in his arms; such a languid little mortal as is seldom seen out of India, where the swift, sharp fever of the changing seasons seems to take the very, life from a child in a few hours. The fluffy golden head in its limp white sun-bonnet rested inert against the orderly's scarlet coatee, the listless little legs drooped helplessly among the burnished belts and buckles.
"Poor little chick! Let me have her a bit, orderly," said Kate, laying her hand caressingly on the slack dimpled arm; but baby, with a fretful whine, nestled her cheek closer into the scarlet. A shade of satisfaction made its owner's dark face less impassive, and the small, sinewy, dark hands held their white burden a shade tighter.
"She is so cross," complained the mother. "It has been so all day. She won't leave the man for an instant. He must be sick of her, though he doesn't show it. And she used to go to the ayah; but do you know, Kate, I don't trust the woman a bit. I believe she gives opium to the child, so that she may get a little rest."
Kate looked at the ayah's face with a sudden doubt. "I don't know," she said slowly. "I think they believe it is a good thing. I remember when Freddy was a baby----"
"Oh, I don't believe they ever think that sort of thing," interrupted Mrs. Seymour. "You never can trust the natives, you know. That's the worst of India. Oh! how I wish I was back in dear old England with a real nurse who would take the children off my hands."
But Kate Erlton was following up her own doubt. "The children trust them----" she began.
"My dear Kate! you can't trust children either. Look at baby! It gives me the shudders to think of touching Bij-rao, and see how she cuddles up to him," replied Mrs. Seymour, as she dawdled on to the house; then, seeing the bed of heartsease, paused to go into raptures over them. They were like English ones, she said.
The puzzled look left Kate's face. "I sent some home last mail," she replied in a sort of hushed voice, "just to show them that we were not cut off from everything we care for; not everything."
So, as if by one accord, these two Englishwomen raised their eyes from the pansy bed, and passing by the flowering shrubs, the encircling tamarind trees framing the cozy, home-like house, rested them on the reddening gold of the western sky. Its glow lay on their faces, making them radiant.
But baby's heavy lids had fallen at last over her heavy eyes as she lay in the orderly's arms, and he glanced at the ayah with a certain pride in his superior skill as a nurse.
CHAPTER III.
THE GREAT GULF FIXED.
It was a quaint house in the oldest quarter of the city of Lucknow, where odd little groves linger between the alleys, so that men pass, at a step, from evil-smelling lanes to cool, scented retreats, dark with orange and mango trees; where birds flutter, and squirrels loll yawning through the summer days, as if the great town were miles away.
It was in the furthest corner of such a flowerless, shady garden that the house reared its lessening stories and projecting eaves above its neighbors. The upper half of it was not unlike an Italian villa in its airiness, its balustraded roof, its green jalousies; but the lower portion was unmistakably Indian. It was a perfect rabbit warren of dark cells, crushed in on each other causelessly; the very staircase, though but two feet wide, having to fold itself away circumspectly so as to find space to creep upward.
But no one lived below, and the dark twists and turns of the brick ladder mattered little to Zora bibi, who lived in the pleasant pavilions above; for she had scarcely ever left them since the day, nearly eight years past, when James Greyman had installed her there with all the honor possible to the situation. Which was, briefly, that he had bought the slip of a girl from a house of ill-fame, as he would have bought a horse, or a flower-pot, or anything else which he thought would make life pleasanter to him. He had paid a long price for her, not only because she was beautiful, but because he pitied the delicate-looking child--for she was little more--just about to enter a profession to which she was evidently a recruit kidnaped in early infancy; as so many are in India. Not that his pity would have led him to buy her if she had been ugly, or even dark; for the creamy ivory tint of her skin satisfied his fastidiousness quite as much as did the hint of a soul in her dark, dreamy eyes. Romance had perhaps had more to do with his purchase than passion; restless, reckless determination to show himself that he had no regrets for the society which had dispensed with his, had had more than either. For he had begun to rent the pleasant pavilions after a few years of adventurous roving had emphasized the gulf fixed between him and his previous life, and forced his pride into leading his present one as happily as he could.
As
