ch a woman is no sooner comprehended on one problem than she unfolds
another; much of man's growth is from one to another of her mysteries.
And always when he has passed one, he thinks all is known; and always
as another looms, he realises how little he knows after all. . . .

A thousand times Skag recalled the words of the learned man who had
spoken to Cadman and himself on their way to the grass jungle. "You
will acknowledge love, but you will not know love until it is revealed
by supreme danger. The way of your feet is in the ascending path.
Hold fast to the purposes of your own heart and you will come into the
heights."

Could Carlin be more to him than now? . . . Yes, she was more to-day
than yesterday. It would always be so. Love is always love, but it is
always different. . . . Sometimes he would stay away from the bungalow
for several hours. He was of a nature that could not be pleased with
himself when he gave way tumultuously to the thing he wanted--which was
continually to be in Carlin's presence. His every step in the
market-place, or in the bazaar, had its own twitch back toward Malcolm
M'Cord's bungalow; his every thought encountering a pressure of weight
to hurry home.

Carlin was full of deep joys of understanding. One did not have to
finish sentences for her. She meant India--its hidden wisdom. She had
the thing called education in great tiers and folds. Skag's education
was of the kind that accumulates when a man does not know he is being
educated. . . . Certainly Carlin was unattainable--this was an often
recurring thought as he learned Hindi from her and something of Urdu;
the usages of her world, its castes and cults.

Down in the unwalled city one mid-afternoon, he finished certain
errands and started for the bungalow. Had he let himself go, his feet
would have stormed along. He laughed at the joy of the thing; and he
had only been away since tiffin. Yet there was tension too--the old
mystery. A man cannot feel all still and calm and powerful, when there
has suddenly descended upon him realisation of all that can possibly
happen to take away one so much more important than one's own life as
to make contrast absurd. Skag was looking ahead into stark days, when
he would be called upon to take big journeys alone into the jungle for
the service. It was very clear there might be many weeks of separation
. . . and now it was only a matter of hours. He was nearing the little
gate.