Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/105



“Yes. At least I can arrange it so.”

“Good. And perhaps you can arrange too that the trial—it will not be for many, many weeks?”

“Well—I may be able to hold it over until the September assizes. But why, man? Heavens above, do you prefer to stay in jail?”

“Yes, saheb, if that should keep Mr. Higgins in town.”

“But—why, man? What's going on in the back of your twisting Oriental brain?”

And Ali Yusuf Khan had smiled guilelessly and had refused to answer any further questions.

Meanwhile, the Kashmere came in sight of Calcutta, and all the world was on deck, exchanging cards and promises to write, which would not be kept, and beginning to reestablish the strict social lines of Anglo-India which divide a deputy assistant commissioner's wife from the wife of a penniless subaltern of native infantry, lines which had been partly forgotten in the humanizing influence of an ocean steamship.

Utterly alone in the throng, with the very stewards knowing and whispering of his disgrace. Hector Wade leaned over the top deck gunwale, looking out to where the sun was rising in the distant east behind lowering cloud banks that were like mountains of gold, glowing lava. There was a gauze-like fog which lifted suddenly, and, minute by minute. Job Charnock's old town came more sharply into the focus. Nearer and nearer it came until he could see the details.

The roofs of the city were bathed in a purple light.