And before he knew how to answer her, Colonel Mayhew was upon them, overflowing with cheerful raillery, and radiantly unaware that he had stepped into a powder magazine. Long before the returning procession reached the Residency, Quita had repented of her little-minded display of irritation, consoling herself with the resolve that she would atone for it next time; whereas Lenox had decided that for once Honor Desmond's intuition was at fault: that it needed no 'bogey of heredity' to widen the impassable gulf dividing him from his wife. CHAPTER XI. "O all that in me wanders, and is wild, Gathers into one wave, and breaks on thee." --Phillips. In the deep heart of Kalatope Forest, where the trees fall apart as if by unanimous consent, the natural glade of Kajiar lies like a giant emerald under a turquoise sky. Peace broods over this sanctuary of Nature's making, dove-like, with folded wings. No lightest echo of the world's turmoil and strife disturbs the stillness. Only at dawn and dusk, the thin note of the temple bell, the chanting of priests, and the unearthly minor wail of conches, announce the downsitting and uprising of the little stone image of godhead, housed in a picturesque temple that nestles among low trees, beside the Holy Lake, at the southern end of the glade. For Hindus are the most devout Nature-worshippers on the face of the earth. To them, beauty of place translates itself as God's direct cry to the soul; and in the isolated glade of Kajiar, with its sweep of shelving turf, its encircling pines and deodars, and its towering snow-peaks standing sentinel in the north,--deity reigns supreme; deity and the great grey ape of the Himalayas. Only for one week in the year does Kajiar spring full-fledged into a place of human significance. From Dalhousie, on the one hand, and from Chumba on the other, a light-hearted crowd of revellers profanes the quiet of earth and sky. On the outskirts of the forest tents spring up, like mushrooms, in a night; the devotional voices of the temple are drowned in the clamour of bugles, the throb of racing hoofs, the challenging gaiety of the band, and the heart-stirring wail of the Royal Chumba Pipers; wiry hill-men, in kilts and tartans;--the pride of the young Rajah's heart. The 'Kajiar week' is the central event of Dalhousie's season:--an Arcadian revel of perfumed shadow, and sun-warmed earth; a carnival of camp-life; ushering in the gloom of the Great Rains;--the triple tyranny of mist, mildew, and mackintoshes. And early on the morning after the _Mela_,--while the breath of night still lingered in gorges and ravines, and in shadowed patches of the ascending path, a mixed procession of men and horses, shuffling mules, and trotting coolies wound, snake-like, out of the Chumba valley towards Kalatope Forest and the emerald glade.