e. A queer breathlessness came to him a little later, as her
head rolled to one side--such a sinking of weakness in the movement.
It reminded him with a shock that she had never seemed quite tireless
since that long ride on Mitha Baba's neck. But never before had her
face turned away from him.

And now he saw a certain inimitable loveliness of her. There were no
words to describe the last--only that it was Spirit made of all the
dusks and all the white fires. There was something little about her
that called an undreamed-of tenderness; and something superb and
mysterious, so vast that he could be held in it like a toy in the hands.

Burning Indian day was walled and curtained and barred from the place
where she lay. White of the walls, white of her face, white of the
pallet--the rest a breathless, ungleaming shadow that held a heat not
from the sun, as it seemed, but from the centre of the earth.

. . . Skag was away in timelessness and an unfamiliar space. This
space was not fixed to one dimension, but moved back and forth. As
Bhanah came to him, he saw more than Bhanah animate upon the
features--like someone who had belonged always, whom he had known for
ages, whom Carlin had always known. So many things struck him
differently now; as if they belonged not just to this crisis, but to a
crisis of eons.

Yet externals in the main were so trifling. Carlin didn't eat; people
seemed to take that as significant. Malcolm M'Cord came. Margaret
Annesley came. Horace Dickson's father came. Skag went to the bazaars
and back again. He went to the monkey glen. It was all a blur. Once
he caught himself walking on the great Highway-of-all-India; and once
deep in the jungle. He passed the civil surgeon of Hurda on his own
verandah; and someone said that the old "family doctor" was to come
from Poona. . . . Now he was in Carlin's room and Carlin was looking
at him. He saw her face the moment he entered the room, and the fact
that he had come in from the fierce daylight into the shadows did, not
seem to blur his eyes, even for a second.

Her people in the room--Bhanah, the ayah, the civil surgeon, Ian Deal
and someone else--but the line from her eyes to Skag was not crossed.
The heart of the man leaped from what he saw--the transcendent
understanding which needed no words; the look of all looks that meant
_herself_--a little lingering smile on the lips, the endless lure of
her wise eyes.

But all that was whippe