No woman in India was as happy, at that particular moment, as the Genevese, who merely bowed in silence, and glided softly away, having escaped the levin-bolt of Hugh Johnstone’s wrath, ever ready, lurking under his bushy, white eyebrows. It was the work of a moment for her to fulfill her simple task as messenger, and this done, she burned to hide herself in her own coign of vantage, for certain new-born ideas of personal decoration were crystallizing in her excited brain. For the first time in her life, she would be fair to man’s views; so as to justify the partner of her momentous secret in the complimentary remarks which, even now, made her ears tingle in delight. “Do you know aught of this Major Hawke who comes to-day?” wearily, said the listless girl. “Some one of these red-faced old relics of my father’s early life, I suppose!” The Rose of Delhi was gazing wistfully out upon the wilderness of beauty in the tangled gardens, sweeping far out to where the high stone wall shut off the glare and flying dust of the Chandnee Chouk. “Certainly not, Nadine!” softly said the governess. “This is only a peopled wilderness to me!” Her heart smote her as the girl, with a sudden lonely sinking of the heart, threw her arms around the neck of her startled companion. “I am so unhappy here--so wretched, this is but a gleaning white stone prison, Justine! I stifle in this wretched land! Why did my father bring me here to die by inches?” There was no pretense in her stormy sobs. “We are soon going home, Darling!” cried the affrighted Swiss. “Just now your father told me that we were all to leave India forever, and at once.” And so, gently soothing the unhappy girl, orphaned in her heart, Justine Delande escaped to the first essay of her life in high decorative art. “There is some strange mystery of the past in all this! He has a heart of flint, this old tyrant!” murmured Justine, as with fingers trembling in haste she completed a toilet, which later caused even old Hugh Johnstone to growl “By Gad! This Swiss woman’s not half bad looking!” A last pang, caused by the keen secret sorrow of not daring to wear her diamond bracelet, was effaced by the rising tide of indignation in Justine Delande’s awakened heart. There were strange emotional currents fitfully thrilling through her usually placid veins as she stole a last glance at herself in the mirror. “A tyrant to the daughter. I warrant that in the old days he broke the mother’s heart! He never mentions her! Not a picture is here--nothing--not even a memento, not a reference to the woman who gave him this lovely child! Her life, her death, even her resting place, are all wrapped in the selfish and brutal silence of a selfish tyrant! He should have been only a drill sergeant to knock about the half-crazed brutes who stagger under a soldier’s pack over these burning plains!” It suddenly occurred to her that in some mysterious way Major Alan Hawke’s coming would contribute