Page:Harold Lamb--The House of the Falcon.djvu/67

 shade of anxiety. Almost to himself he quoted another couplet, but Edith's quick ear caught the words:

The flush of evening lay again upon Srinagar; the sky was flaming from the gateway of the departing sun. Mists were gathering in the hollows and creeping together along the plain, as if tenuous spirit hands were gripping each other.

The mists half concealed a caravan of animals winding along a path outside the city. Edith could see only the heads of horses and the cloaked forms of riders. It was as if beasts and men were swimming in a gray sea in the evening calm.

Like an echo from another world, she heard the faint sound of tinkling bells wafted from the caravan—the hoa-hoa of drivers. A hooded wagon rumbled in the mist. Barely could the girl see the moving shapes, so swiftly did the wings of evening fall.

She wondered briefly if the cavalcade included the tonga of her father. Then she reflected that he would approach Srinagar from another quarter. She looked up. Her aunt had neither seen nor heard the caravan.

Edith glanced back at the path in the mist. The riders and horses were almost invisible. Dimly the hood of the ekka moved along jerkily. Then her own carriage swerved into a drive, and the Afghan servant and Rawul Singh shouted as they almost collided with a vehicle coming from the other direction.

Through the garden the bulk of the sprawling, ill-designed palace confronted them. Edith was claimed joyously at the entrance by her new friends, the young