have been tightly tied up--quite another to
bring himself so nearly within the clutches of the law as to make it
possible for the Government of India to dismiss him.

And what was he to do? What did the future hold for him?

Who would give employment to however able a man with such a career
behind him?

Jan's imagination refused to take such flights. Resolutely she put the
subject from her and began to consider what her own best course would be
with Fay, her nephew and niece, and, very shortly, a new baby on her
hands.

Jan was not a young woman to let things drift. She had kept house for a
whimsical, happy-go-lucky father since she was fourteen; mothered her
beautiful young sister; and, at her father's death, two years before,
had with quiet decision arranged her own life, wholly avoiding the
discussion and the friction which generally are the lot of an unmarried
woman of five-and-twenty left without natural guardians and with a large
circle of friends and relations.

It was nearly two o'clock when she undressed and went to bed, and before
that she had drafted two cablegrams--one to a house-agent, the other to
her bankers.

CHAPTER III

BOMBAY

For Jan the next two days passed as in a more or less disagreeable
dream. She could never afterwards recall very clearly what happened,
except that Sir Langham Sykes seemed absolutely omnipresent, and made
her, she felt, ridiculous before the whole ship, by proclaiming far and
wide that she had bestowed upon him the healing gift of sleep.

He was so effusive, so palpably grateful, that she simply could not
undeceive him by telling him that after they parted the night before she
had never given him another thought.

When he was not doing this he was pursuing, with fulminations against
the whole tribe of missionaries, two kindly, quiet members of the
Society of Friends.

In an evil moment they had gratified his insatiable curiosity as to the
object of their voyage to India, which was to visit and report upon the
missionary work of their community. Once he discovered this he never let
them alone, and the deck resounded with his denunciations of all
Protestant missionaries as "self-seeking, oily humbugs."

They bore it with well-mannered resignation, and a common dislike for
Sir Langham formed quite a bond of union between them and Jan.

There was the usual dance on New Year's Eve, the usual singing of "Auld
Lang Syne" in two huge circles; and Jan would have