Gillis gasped. He had seen enough of Georgina in the old times to know that explanations would be useless. You cannot explain things to the Oriental. You must show. ‘I’ll take you there,’ said Gillis, and he led Georgina off the road, up the cliff, by a little pathway, to the back of a house set on a platform cut into the hillside. The lamps were just lit, but the curtains were not drawn. ‘Now look,’ said Gillis, stopping in front of the drawing-room window. Georgina looked and saw Georgie Porgie and the Bride. She put her hand up to her hair, which had come out of its top-knot and was straggling about her face. She tried to set her ragged dress in order, but the dress was past pulling straight, and she coughed a queer little cough, for she really had taken a very bad cold. Gillis looked, too, but while Georgina only looked at the Bride once, turning her eyes always on Georgie Porgie, Gillis looked at the Bride all the time. ‘What are you going to do?’ said Gillis, who held Georgina by the wrist, in case of any unexpected rush into the lamplight. ‘Will you go in and tell that English woman that you lived with her husband?’ ‘No,’ said Georgina faintly. ‘Let me go. I am going away. I swear that I am going away.’ She twisted herself free and ran off into the dark. ‘Poor little beast!’ said Gillis, dropping on to the main road. ‘I’d ha’ given her something to get back to Burma with. What a narrow shave though! And that angel would never have forgiven it.’ This seems to prove that the devotion of Gillis was not entirely due to his affection for Georgie Porgie. The Bride and the Bridegroom came out into the verandah after dinner, in order that the smoke of Georgie Porgie’s cheroots might not hang in the new drawing-room curtains. ‘What is that noise down there?’ said the Bride. Both listened. ‘Oh,’ said Georgie Porgie, ‘I suppose some brute of a hillman has been beating his wife.’ ‘Beating--his--wife! How ghastly!’ said the Bride. ‘Fancy YOUR beating ME!’ She slipped an arm round her husband’s waist, and, leaning her head against his shoulder, looked out across the cloud-filled valley in deep content and security. But it was Georgina crying, all by herself, down the hillside, among the stones of the water-course where the washermen wash the clothes. NABOTH [Footnote: Copyright, 1891, by MACMILLAN & Co.] This was how it happened; and the truth is also an allegory of Empire.