d, but very
obvious, guard that lounged outside--the sense of rank injustice
and helplessness--the weird feeling of impending horror added onto
stale-grown ghastliness--youth, chafing at the lack of liberty--stirred
her to action.

Without a word to her father, who was writing reports that seemed
endless at the little desk by the shaded window, she left the
house--drew with a physical effort on all her reserve of strength and
health--faced the scorching afternoon wind, as though it were a foe that
could shrink away before her courage, and walked, since she had no pony
now, in any direction in which chance or her momentary whim might care
to lead her.

"I won't cry again--and I won't submit--and I'll see what happens!" she
told herself; and the four who followed her at a none-too-respectful
distance--two of the Maharajah's men in uniform and two shabby-looking
ruffians of Jaimihr's--grinned as they scented action. Like their
masters they bore no love for one another; they were there now, in fact,
as much to watch one another as the missionaries; they detected the
possibility of an excuse to be at one another's throats, and gloated
as they saw two messengers, one of either side, run off in a hurry to
inform the rival camps.

It was neither plan nor conscious selection that led Rosemary McClean
toward the far end of the maidan, where the sluggish, narrow, winding
Howrah River sucked slimily beside the burning ghats. When she realized
where her footsteps were leading her she would have turned in horror and
retreated, for even a legitimately roasting corpse that died before the
Hindoo priests had opportunity to introduce it to the flames is no sight
for eyes that are civilized.

But, when she turned her head, the sight of her hurrying escort
perspiring in her wake--(few natives like the heat and wind one whit
better than their conquerors)--filled her with an unexpected, probably
unjustifiable, determination not to let them see her flinch at any kind
of horror. That was the spirit of sahibdom that is not always quite
commendable; it is the spirit that takes Anglo-Saxon women to the
seething, stenching plains and holds them there high-chinned to stiffen
their men-folk by courageous example, but it leads, too, to things not
quite so womanly and good.

"I'll show them!" muttered Rosemary McClean, wiping the blown dust from
her eyes and facing the wind again that now began to carry with it the
unspread taint--the awful, si