"Yes, it's bad enough as it is. This girl, brought up with a taste for everything money can buy, and left without any provision. I call it a most shameful, abominable business. Verona will never understand shifts and scraping. She will have to put up with a vile climate, and to adapt herself to a new life. Now Madge is away, and Robert is at sea, I think she might remain on as our adopted daughter. She does the flowers for you, and mends my gloves, and cuts my papers, and plays picquet, and sends back my books to the London library--we shall not be able to spare her." "My dear Joe, I'm afraid we must, sorely as we want her, and much as I believe she loves us. Her heart, as I've already assured you, is with her own people. If we kept her with us, she would be continually pining to fly away, like a robin in a cage." "I sincerely hope her expectations may be realised, but I think it is a risky experiment, attaching oneself to a hitherto unknown family." "She will be an acquisition anywhere, so lively and so sweet tempered, and entirely unconscious of herself. Her great social success never made the smallest difference to us; she wrote to me as regularly as Madge. I believe she had no end of offers of marriage--including one from a prince!" "Oh, well, I cannot exactly credit _that_. And anyway, I can assure you, she will never have a chance of becoming a princess in India. Joking apart, I'm really anxious about the child. Do you have a good talk to her, Lucy, and try once more, if she will not accept the bird in the hand, and remain with us, for the birds in the bush may be of doubtful plumage." "I will see what I can do," assented Mrs. Melville, "but in return for your half proverb, I will give you a whole one." "What may it be?" "Far off hills are green." Joselyn Melville made no attempt to argue the question further, but merely resumed the _Guardian_ with a grunt. In three weeks' time Mr. and Mrs. Melville accompanied their charge to Tilbury, and when they saw the _Arabia_ leave her moorings, waved good-bye to Verona with as much emotion as if she had been their own child. CHAPTER X At four o'clock in the afternoon the chief event of the day, the Bombay mail, was due at Rajahpore. The railway station was crammed, not merely with passengers, but idlers and loafers, who attended this train in order to see the people who were going North, and to gather jokes, scraps of gossip, and news. Soldiers were present in considerable force, as well as the local police, and numbers of Eurasians and natives, all assembled with the harmless object of enjoying a slight break in the monotony of their existence.