begin at the beginning, and learn my trade
like a journeyman labourer. I had come to the right place. A very
wonderful city is Peshawar--rather let us say, two cities--the
compounds, the fortifications where Europeans dwell in such peace as
their strong right arms can secure them; and the native city and bazaar
humming and buzzing like a hive of angry bees with the rumours that
come up from Lower India or down the Khyber Pass with the camel caravans
loaded with merchandise from Afghanistan, Bokhara, and farther. And
it is because of this that Peshawar is the Key of India, and a city
of Romance that stands at every corner, and cries aloud in the
market--place. For at Peshawar every able-bodied man sleeps with his
revolver under his pillow, and the old Fort is always ready in case it
should be necessary at brief and sharp notice to hurry the women and
children into it, and possibly, to die in their defense. So enlivening
is the neighbourhood of the frontier tribes that haunt the famous Khyber
Pass and the menacing hills where danger is always lurking.

But there was society here, and I was swept into it--there was chatter,
and it galled me.

I was beginning to feel that I had missed my mark, and must go farther
afield, perhaps up into Central Asia, when I met Vanna Loring. If I say
that her hair was soft and dark; that she had the deepest hazel eyes
I have ever seen, and a sensitive, tender mouth; that she moved with a
flowing grace like "a wave of the sea"--it sounds like the portrait of a
beauty, and she was never that. Also, incidentally, it gives none of her
charm. I never heard any one get any further than that she was "oddly
attractive"--let us leave it at that. She was certainly attractive to
me.

She was the governess of little Winifred Meryon, whose father held
the august position of General Commanding the Frontier Forces, and her
mother the more commanding position of the reigning beauty of Northern
India, generally speaking. No one disputed that. She was as pretty as
a picture, and her charming photograph had graced as many illustrated
papers as there were illustrated papers to grace.

But Vanna--I gleaned her story by bits when I came across her with the
child in the gardens. I was beginning to piece it together now.

Her love of the strange and beautiful she had inherited from a young
Italian mother, daughter of a political refugee; her childhood had
been spent in a remote little village in the West of E