she told me it was all her fault: she could not wait.

'Perhaps,' she said, with a little laugh and a side-glance at her
husband--'perhaps, if he had gone with the thakin to Rangoon, he might
have fallen in love with someone there and forgotten me; for I know they
are very pretty, those Rangoon ladies, and of better manners than I, who
am but a jungle girl.'

And when I asked her what it was like in the forest, she said it was the
most beautiful place in all the world.

Things do not always go so well. Parents may be obdurate, and flight be
impossible; or even her love may not be returned, and then terrible
things happen. I have held, not once nor twice alone, inquests over the
bodies, the fair, innocent bodies, of quite young girls who died for
love. Only that, because their love was unreturned; and so the sore
little heart turned in her trouble to the great river, and gave herself
and her hot despair to the cold forgetfulness of its waters.

They love so greatly that they cannot face a world where love is not.
All the country is full of the romance of love--of love passionate and
great as woman has ever felt. It seems to me here that woman has
something of the passions of man, not only the enduring affection of a
woman, but the hot love and daring of a man. It is part of their
heritage, perhaps, as a people in their youth. One sees so much of it,
hears so much of it, here. I have seen a girl in man's attire killed in
a surprise attack upon an insurgent camp. She had followed her outlawed
lover there, and in the melee she caught up sword and gun to fight by
his side, and was cut down through neck and shoulder; for no one could
tell in the early dawn that it was a girl.

She died about an hour afterwards, and though I have seen many sorrowful
things in many lands, in war and out of it, the memory of that dying
girl, held up by one of the mounted police, sobbing out her life beneath
the wild forest shadow, with no one of her sex, no one of her kin to
help her, comes back to me as one of the saddest and strangest.

Her lover was killed in action some time later fighting against us, and
he died as a brave man should, his face to his enemy. He played his
game, he lost, and paid; but the girl?

I have seen and heard so much of this love of women and of its
tragedies. Perhaps it is that to us it is usually the tragedies that are
best remembered. Happiness is void of interest. And this love may be,
after all, a good th