Mrs. Fellowes was specially delighted to see her young friend as a proof that she had not suffered from her slip on the treacherous steps of the tank. She welcomed Mark with cordiality, introducing him to her husband, a tall spare man of bony frame with a simple earnest face, bronzed by the suns of many hot weathers on Indian plains where he had trained his sepoys and loved them like children. "Yes, the Colonel and I like to think of our bungalow as a cottage with roses looking in at the window," Mrs. Fellowes was saying, as Mark, with the keen eye of the new-comer, commented on the home-like attributes of the bungalow with its trellised verandah, where creepers twined their graceful tendrils, and roses and wisteria climbed up its amber-coloured walls and pillars. "But I hope we shan't make the mistake of some Anglo-Indians and try to reproduce it at home." "I believe you are right, Mrs. Fellowes," returned Mark. "My father's people happen to live in Shropshire, not far from Styche Hall, Clive's birthplace, and I always regretted he should have replaced the old black-timbered house by a mansion with verandahs." "Yes," said Colonel Fellowes, who had joined them, "I once made a pilgrimage to see that house--Clive being one of my heroes. We should have worshipped that simple black-timbered house if it had still been extant. All the same, the present one isn't the gorgeous palace Macaulay would have us believe. Poor Clive, he was much maligned, as many of the makers of India have been! What would the Carnatic, for instance, be now, but for Clive? A tiger jungle--only the tigers two-footed instead of four, and tearing each other to bits!" "The result has been good, certainly," replied Mark, "but are you sure it was not the hungry mouth of the rapacious West, craving for pepper and cardamoms, and hankering after the fabled gold and gems of Hindustan, that brought the white men? Remember he came as a suppliant trader to these shores and first begged for crumbs!" "Granted!" returned Colonel Fellowes. "Just as the Israelites came to the land of Canaan--sent by the same Hand. Depend upon it the hosts of our forefathers were the hosts of God, as Kingsley says. But talking of reproducing chunam palaces at home, I was amused to hear Rayner saying the other day at the Club that he had got a plan of his house in Clive's Road, and meant to reproduce it in Belgravia! 'First catch the standing room,' said I. He's an ambitious young fellow that, and a pushing one! I wish his ambition would take the form of giving his wife a good mount. I told him of a perfect one to be had at Waller's stables, but he wouldn't hear of it." "But Mrs. Rayner used to be a keen horsewoman," said Mark, recalling vividly some pleasant rides in Worcestershire lanes.