* *

Before tea was over, peacocks and pigeons had gone to roost among the
trees that shadowed the Lake; and the light behind the hills had passed
swiftly from gold to flame-colour, from flame-colour to rose. For the
sun, that had already departed in effect, was now setting in fact.

"Hush--it's coming," murmured Thea:--and it came.

Hollow thuds, quickening to a vibrant roar, swelled up from the temple
in the courtyard below. The Brahmins were beating the great tom-tom
before Kali's Shrine.

It was the signal. It startlingly waked the dead city to discordant
life. Groanings and howlings and clashings, as of Tophet, were echoed
and re-echoed from every temple, every shrine; an orgy of demoniac
sounds; blurred in transit through the empty rooms beneath; pierced at
intervals by the undulating wail of ram's horns; the two reiterate notes
wandering, like lost souls, through a confused blare of cymbals and
bagpipes and all kinds of music.

Flossie, with a bewitching grimace at Martin, clapped both hands over
her ears. Roy--standing by the balustrade with Aruna--was aware of an
answering echo somewhere in subconscious depths, as the discords rose
and fell above the throbbing undernote of the drum. It was as if the
claimant voices of the East cried out to the blood in his veins: 'You
are of us--do what you will; go where you will.' And all the while his
eyes never left Aruna's half-averted face.

Sudden and clear from the heights came a ringing peal of bells, as it
were the voices of angels answering the wail of devils in torment. It
was from the little Shrine of Shiva close against the ramparts, etched
in outline, above the dark of the hills.

Aruna turned and looked up at him. "Too beautiful!" she whispered.

He nodded, and flung out an arm. "Look there!"

Low and immense--pale in the pallor of the eastern sky--the moon hung
poised above massed shadows, like a wraith escaped from the city of
death. Moment by moment, she drew light from the vanished sun. Moment by
moment, under their watching eyes, she conjured the formless dark into a
new heaven, a new earth....

"Would you be afraid--to stroll round a little ... with me?" he asked.

"Afraid? I would love it--if Thea will allow." This time she did not
look up.

Vincent and Thea were sitting a little farther along the balustrade;
Lance beside them, imbibing tales of Rajasthan. Flossie and her Captain
had already disappeared.

"_I'm_ going to be fr