get a better man, swung his canvas bag
across his shoulder and marched away.

"What kind of a man is a better man than Bill?" she had wondered. Men
like Bill seem to have a knack of judging character, and of picking
girls who are as steadfast as themselves. So it is not to be wondered at
that almost before her tears were dry she had set about attempting what
few women of her type and time would have dreamed of. If Bill had set
her free, she reasoned, Bill had no more authority over her, and she
might do exactly what she chose. Bill could release, but he could not
make her take another man. So, for all that the local yeomen, and local
tradesmen even, haunted the little cottage on the Downs, and pestered
her with their attentions, no one supplanted Bill.

Bill could tell her--and had told her--that India was no country for a
white woman; that there were snakes there, and black men and tigers and
even worse. But, since he had set her free, if she could manage it
she was quite at liberty to brave the tigers and the snakes. And, once
there, she would see whether she was free or not, and whether Bill was,
either!

It took Bill Brown six years of constant honest effort to become a
sergeant. It took Jane Emmett six weeks of pride-consuming and vexatious
vigilance to procure for herself a job as nurse in a soldier-family. And
it took her six more years of unremitting diligence, sweetened by all
the attributes that seem desirable when nursing other people's children
and embittered by the shame of grudging patronage, before she was
considered dependable enough to be recommended for the service of a
family just leaving for Bengal. Then, however, her world was a real
world again!

Five months on a sailing-ship around the Cape--deep-laden, gunwales
awash in a beam--on Bay-of-Biscay "snorer," hove-to for a week off Cape
Agul--has, while the clumsy brigantine rolled the masts loose in her,
all but dismasted in a typhoon come astray from the China Sea, fed on
moldy bread, and even moldier pork, with a fretful child to nurse, and
an exacting mother to be pleased! Jane Emmett laughed at it. Bill had
been there before her, and had done more on his way, and worse Bengal
did not frighten her. Nor did the knowledge, when she reached it, that
Bill was very likely still some hundreds of miles away. She, who had
come five thousand miles as the crows are said to fly and nine thousand
by the map, could manage the odd hundreds. And she could wa