sperately; goaded by the knowledge that he would
not soon get speech of her again.

"Possibly not. But I don't feel called upon to retire into a convent,
or to advertise the fact that I am not . . . 'on the market.' Nor do I
choose to have my conduct called in question by any man living."

She faced him now;--defiant, a bright spot on either cheek.

And before he knew how to answer her, Colonel Mayhew was upon them,
overflowing with cheerful raillery, and radiantly unaware that he had
stepped into a powder magazine.

Long before the returning procession reached the Residency, Quita had
repented of her little-minded display of irritation, consoling herself
with the resolve that she would atone for it next time; whereas Lenox
had decided that for once Honor Desmond's intuition was at fault: that
it needed no 'bogey of heredity' to widen the impassable gulf dividing
him from his wife.

CHAPTER XI.

"O all that in me wanders, and is wild,
Gathers into one wave, and breaks on thee."
--Phillips.

In the deep heart of Kalatope Forest, where the trees fall apart as if by
unanimous consent, the natural glade of Kajiar lies like a giant emerald
under a turquoise sky. Peace broods over this sanctuary of Nature's
making, dove-like, with folded wings. No lightest echo of the world's
turmoil and strife disturbs the stillness. Only at dawn and dusk, the
thin note of the temple bell, the chanting of priests, and the unearthly
minor wail of conches, announce the downsitting and uprising of the
little stone image of godhead, housed in a picturesque temple that
nestles among low trees, beside the Holy Lake, at the southern end of the
glade.

For Hindus are the most devout Nature-worshippers on the face of the
earth. To them, beauty of place translates itself as God's direct cry to
the soul; and in the isolated glade of Kajiar, with its sweep of shelving
turf, its encircling pines and deodars, and its towering snow-peaks
standing sentinel in the north,--deity reigns supreme; deity and the
great grey ape of the Himalayas.

Only for one week in the year does Kajiar spring full-fledged into a
place of human significance. From Dalhousie, on the one hand, and from
Chumba on the other, a light-hearted crowd of revellers profanes the
quiet of earth and sky. On the outskirts of the forest tents spring up,
like mushrooms, in a night; the devotional voices of the temple are
drowned in the clamour of bugles, th