aven
or the hotel upon any lovely woman on her own!

Yes! but--did all _that_ really do the actual slamming?

Not a bit of it!

It was the most convenient excuse the womenfolk could find to hang upon
the peg of jealousy which had been knocked into the wall of feminine
conceit and bad intent, by the hammer of Leonie's beauty, and
irritating indifference to both men and women, especially the former.

Let any woman lure to her side some other woman's own particular bit of
masculine property; poach successfully upon her understocked male
preserves; and figuratively, maybe verbally, most assuredly positively
if she live east of Blackfriars, the claws of jealousy will be
sharpened upon her; _but_--ignore the bit of masculine property, pass
it by on the other side, consider it as belonging to somebody else,
leave the preserves severely alone, and vials of execration, anathema,
and denunciation, which are all synonyms for the same thing, will be
poured upon her because of her lack of the appreciative faculty.

Fact!

Very few women can see the difference between joyfully hoarding genuine
antique pewter, and wearing a second-hand neglige.

So Leonie was fleeing home via Calcutta, and she sat without movement,
hating herself and the world, even the man who, having taken her at her
word, had left her alone to stumble as best she could along the
crooked, lonely road which would end, as far as she could see, in a
padded cell.

"How could you?" she suddenly cried aloud, and the natives made
surreptitious signs, and withdrew to a certain distance out of respect
to the disorder of her mind. "How _could_ you leave me! Didn't you
_know_ that it is because I love you so that I would rather _die_ than
let you share my curse? But couldn't you have done _something_, tried
to follow that clue, gone somewhere, oh! done _anything_ just to show
that----!"

The rumble of wheels cut her agitation short, and drew the native
element closer to the door, in order that it should be quite near the
mem-sahib when she appeared--with her purse in her left hand.

And while she sat on her bed, and later on in the train, striving to
break the mental thongs which bound her to some intangible stake, Jan
Cuxson was sitting in the secret places of the jungle temple, striving
to break the bonds of raw hide by which he had found himself fastened
to a ring in the wall.

As he struggled he speculated savagely upon that insensate sense of
security, c