herever you lead," he answered in Hindustani. These
surroundings were horrible, but the shade of them did not seem to
dim her charm.

The scent in the air was disagreeable. Tawdry spangles and false
jewels lay about on the tumble-down settees. From behind little
doors that opened from the walls round came the sound of men's
voices.

"Let the Sahib come this way, then," she answered, and turned
towards one of the small doors in the wall. This took them into
another tiny, musty-smelling passage that wound about like the run
of a rabbit warren, only wide enough for one to pass along at a
time, and the strips of lath were so low overhead that Hamilton
bent his neck involuntarily to avoid them.

At a door in the side of this she stopped and pushed it open; the
little run way wound on beyond in the darkness.

Hamilton followed her into the sloping-roofed, lath-and-plaster
pent-house that had been run up between the back of the stage and
the wall of the building. Native lamps were hooked into the wall,
and their light showed the garish ugliness of it all--the hastily
whitewashed walls, the scraps of ragged, dirty, scarlet cloth hung
here and there over a bulge or stain in the plaster: the boarded
floor, uneven and cracked: the bed against the wall, not too clean
looking, its dingy curtains not quite concealing the dingier
pillows; the broken chair on which a basin stood, placed on two
grey-looking towels; another chair with the back rails knocked out
leaning against the wall.

He threw his gaze round it in a moment's rapid survey, then he
pressed to the rickety, uneven door and shot the bolt.

The girl stood in the middle of the room, an exquisitely lovely
figure. She regarded him with wide, innocent eyes. Hamilton felt
all the blood alight in his veins; it seemed to him he could hear
his pulses beating. Never in his life before had joy and passion
met within him to stir him as they did now, but in natures where
there is a strong, deep strain of intellectuality the body never
quite conquers the mind, the light of the intellect never quite
goes down, however strong the sea, however high the waves of
animal passion on which it rides; and now Hamilton felt the great
appeal to his brain as well as to his senses that the girl's beauty
made.

He went up to her. She looked at him with an intense admiration,
almost worship in her eyes. A man at such moments looks, as Nature
intended he should, his very best, and Hamilton's