wn tongue, as he felt the sahib's eyes fixed
steadily upon him.

"What did he say to you, Jan?"

As the shikari turned away Cuxson caught the girl's hands and crushed
them up against his heart.

"I will tell you some day!"

"Tell me _now_!"

"No! not now! It is of love that I should have to speak, and in all
these past weeks you have not let me touch your hand or speak to you of
love. You have put a barrier between us, a barrier of a misplaced
fear, which has grown higher and stronger since I have had to confess
to failure in finding any trace of your old servant. India is wide,
dear, and its villages uncountable, and _I_ am not distressed over the
empty return of these last months; all that worries me is, that while
prowling about the Himalayas out of reach of the post, I never knew
what had happened to you, or that you were in India."

Leonie sighed as she opened her hand and looked at the small bones.

"Tell me now, Jan!" she insisted.

"No! Leonie, I cannot. There will be no one near us when I do tell
you, and except as a souvenir of that very fine old man, you need not
keep them, because my love is a still greater and surer charm to bring
you the great happiness they promise."

CHAPTER XXXII

"And thou shalt become an astonishment,
a proverb, a byword."--_The Bible_.

When Leonie returned to Calcutta she found that the tale of her
courageous act which had preceded her, and of which home and local
papers had exhausted themselves in praise, had not served to endear her
to that little white community, which suffers from social myopia, and
the self-adjusted chains of what it most mistakenly calls caste.

Not likely that the feminine members of Jute, military, railway, or law
circles _would_ open their arms any wider to this young, and beautiful,
widowed creature with the mop of naturally curling hair, now that, if
so minded, she could verbally and positively flap one of the finest
tiger skins that had ever come out of Bengal in their heat-stricken
faces.

In fact some of the young ones as they wrestled with the nightly
problem of their own dank, straight particular bit of woman's glory,
would doubtless, if questioned, have upheld the Hindu custom of
completely shaving the widowed head.

Many, in fact, had been the meetings of these younger mem-sahibs in
bungalows, or flats, at Firpoes, or in clubs, where, under the pretext
of criticising the latest fashions from overseas, they discus