"A model couple!" sneered Bethune to himself. And, turning impatiently aside to devote his attention to the more pleasing subject of the oriental, he found the latter just in the act of dropping his glance from the same spectacle, and thought to notice a flicker as of kindred scorn pass across the statuesque composure of the dark face. "For ever will the East and the West be as poles apart," cogitated the soldier, even as M. Châtelard had done; "upon no point do they in their heart more despise us than in our subserviency to our women. I am not sure," he pursued to himself, cynically, as the splendid presence of Saif-u-din settled itself with dignity upon the seat beside him; "I am not sure but that the orientals knew what they were about when they made their laws concerning the false and mischievous sex." Loud and deep rang the great guns of the salute: their Excellencies had started. Rosamond Gerardine was bound for England. In a waggon, at the tail of all the other equipages, sat Jani, withered and sad-faced, wrapt in her thoughts as closely as in her dusky chuddah. She would not talk with the bearers or even lament her coming exile. She held on tightly with one thin brown hand to a much-battered military tin case, which she herself had laid on the seat beside her. No one else would she permit to touch it. The other servants mocked her about it, vowing it was full of her hoardings and that they would rob her of it. At that she would menace them fiercely with her monkey paw. Strange, sad, inscrutable little Parca keeping guard on the fate of lives! *CHAPTER X* Bombay, a very dream-city, was fading—ever more dreamlike, enwrapped in pale-tinted sunset mists—into the distance. The salt breeze was in their faces; in their ears was the rushing of the waters from the sides of the ship as she cut her way through. Already the something of England that the sea must always bring her children, the surroundings of an English ship especially, was about them! They seemed to have come from the land of languor and secret doings into open life, into simple action, into a busy, wholesome stir. Beneath them pulsed the great heart of the ship, white foam pointing her way as she forged ahead. Behind her stretched the furrow of her course, two long lines, ever wider divergent till they lost themselves to the eye. And now, by some fantastic mirage effect, the great oriental port, with its glimmering minarets and cupolas, showed as if caught up into the sky itself. Let but this iron heart labour on a little while longer, let but this eager prow cut its way a little deeper towards the sunset, and the East would have vanished altogether.... The travellers would not even see the first glimmer of her evening lights hung a jewel necklace on the horizon, so swiftly had the sea laid hold of them.