caste, Barlow went
_ghazi_. He drooped his head and let his lips linger against the girl's
eyes, and uttered a superb common-place: "Don't cry, little girl," he
said; "I am seven kinds of a brute to bother you!"

And Bootea thought it would have been better if he had driven a knife
into her heart, and sobbed with increased bitterness. Once her fingers
wandered up searchingly and touched his throat.

Barlow casting about for the wherefore of his madness, discovered the
moonlight, and heard the soft night-air whispering through the harp
chords of trees that threw a tracery of black lines across the white
road; and from a grove of mango trees came the gentle scent of their
blossoms; and he remembered that statistics had it that there was but one
memsahib to so many square miles in that land of expatriation; and he
knew that he was young and full of the joy of life; that a British
soldier was not like a man of Hind who looked upon women as cattle.

There did not obtrude into his mental retrospect as an accusation against
this unwarrantable tenderness the vision of the Resident's
daughter--almost his fiancee. Indeed Elizabeth was the antithesis in
physical appeal of the gentle Gulab; the drawing-room perhaps; repartee
of Damascus steel fineness; tutored polish, class, cold integrity--these
things associated admirably with the unsensuous Elizabeth. Thoughts of
her, remembrances, had no place in glamorous perfumed moonlight.

So he set his teeth and admonished the grey Turcoman, called him the
decrepit son of a donkey, being without speed; and to punish him stroked
his neck gently: even this forced diversion bringing him closer to the
torturing sweetness of the girl.

But now he was aware of a throbbing on the night wind, and a faint shrill
note that lay deep in the shadows beyond. It was a curious rumbling
noise, as though ghosts of the hills on the right were playing bowls with
rounded rocks. And the shrilling skirl grew louder as if men marched
behind bagpipes.

The Gulab heard it, too, and her body stiffened, her head thrust from the
enveloping cloak, and her eyes showed like darkened sapphires.

"Carts carrying cotton perhaps," he said. But presently he knew that
small cotton carts but rattled, the volume of rumbling was as if an army
moved.

From up the road floated the staccato note of a staff beating its
surface, and the clanking tinkle of an iron ring against the wooden staff.

"A mail-carrier," Barlo