days. And when Suraj was announced--"Oh, please--may I see
him?" she begged eagerly as a child.

Suraj graciously permitted his velvet nose to be stroked by alien
fingers, light as rose petals. Then Roy sprang into the saddle; and
Aruna stood watching him as he went--_sais_ and dog trotting to heel--a
graceful lonely figure, shadowed by her semi-transparent parasol.

At a bend in the drive, where a sentry sprang to attention, he turned
for a parting salute. Her answering gesture might or might not have been
intended for him. She at least knew all about the need for being
discreet. For, on leaving the tea-table, they had passed from the dream
of 'almost England' into the dusty actuality of Jaipur.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 6: Instantly.]

CHAPTER V.

"Broadly speaking, there are two blocks of people--East and West;
people who interfere and people who don't interfere; ... East is a
fatalist, West is an idealist, of a clumsy sort."--STACY AUMONIER.

A mile, or less, of tree-bordered road sloped gently from the Residency
gate-posts to the walled City of Victory, backed by craggy, red-grey
spurs of the Aravalli range, hidden almost in feathery heads of banyan,
acacia, and neem--a dusty, well-ordered oasis, holding its own against
the stealthy oncoming of the desert.

North and east ran the screen of low hills with their creeping lines of
masonry; but from south and west the softly encroaching thing crept up
to the city walls, in through the gates, powdering every twig and leaf
and lattice with the fine white dust of death. Shadeless and colourless,
to the limit of vision, it rose and fell in long billowing waves; as if
some wizard, in the morning of the world, had smitten a living ocean to
lifeless sand, where nothing flourished but the camel thorn and the _ak_
plant and gaunt cactus bushes--their limbs petrified in weird
gesticulation.

But on the road itself was a sufficiency of life and colour--parrokeets
flashing from tree to tree, like emeralds made visible and vocable;
village women swathed in red and yellow veils; prancing Rajput
cavaliers, straight from the Middle Ages; ox-carts and camels--unlimited
camels, with flapping lip and scornful eye; a sluggish stream of life,
rising out of the landscape and flowing, from dawn to dusk, through the
seven Gates of Jaipur. And there, on the low spurs, beyond the walls, he
sighted the famous Tiger Fort, and the marble tomb of Jai Sing--he that
bui