dominant and the
subdominant were absent. Strangely attuned to the western ear, the
sounds sometimes boomed, sometimes fell to a whisper. The chant rose
like incense into the heavens, celebrating Durga, protector of the
Motherland, Lakshmi, bowered in the flower that in the water grows.
Cairns had drawn Victoria close against him. He was stirred and shaken
as never before. All conspired against him, the night, the fancied
scents of Araby, the unresisting woman in his arms who yielded him her
lips with the passivity of weariness. They did not think as they kissed,
whether laying the foundation of regret or snatching from the fleeting
hour a moment of thoughtless joy. Again a brass drum boomed out beyond
them, softly as if touched by velvet hands. It carried the buzzing of
bees, the calls of corncrakes, in every tone the rich scents of the
jungle, where undergrowth rots in black water--of perfumes that burn
before the gods. Then the night wind arose and swept away the crooning
voices.

CHAPTER IV

VICTORIA stepped out on to the platform with a heart that bounded and
yet shrank. Not even the first faint coming of the coastline had given
her the almost physical shock that she experienced on this bare
platform. Waterloo station lay around her in a pall of faint yellow mist
that gripped and wrenched at her throat. Through the fog a thousand
ungainly shapes of stairs and signals thrust themselves, some crude in
their near blackness, others fainter in the distance. It might have been
a dream scene but for the uproar that rose around her from the rumble of
London, the voices of a great crowd. Yet all this violence of life, the
darkness, the surge of men and women, all this told her that she was
once more in the midst of things.

She found her belongings mechanically, fumblingly. She did not realise
until then the bitterness that drove its iron into her soul. Already,
when the troopship had entered the Channel she had felt a cruel pang
when she realised that she must expect nothing and that nobody would
greet her. She had fled from the circle near the funnel when the talk
began to turn round London and waiting sisters and fathers, round the
Lord Mayor's show, the play, the old fashioned Christmas. Now, as she
struggled through the crowd that cried out and laughed excitedly and
kissed, she knew her isolation was complete. There was nobody to meet
her. The fog made her eyes smart, so they filled readily with tears.

As