I was beginning to feel that I had missed my mark, and must go farther afield, perhaps up into Central Asia, when I met Vanna Loring. If I say that her hair was soft and dark; that she had the deepest hazel eyes I have ever seen, and a sensitive, tender mouth; that she moved with a flowing grace like “a wave of the sea”--it sounds like the portrait of a beauty, and she was never that. Also, incidentally, it gives none of her charm. I never heard any one get any further than that she was “oddly attractive”--let us leave it at that. She was certainly attractive to me. She was the governess of little Winifred Meryon, whose father held the august position of General Commanding the Frontier Forces, and her mother the more commanding position of the reigning beauty of Northern India, generally speaking. No one disputed that. She was as pretty as a picture, and her charming photograph had graced as many illustrated papers as there were illustrated papers to grace. But Vanna--I gleaned her story by bits when I came across her with the child in the gardens. I was beginning to piece it together now. Her love of the strange and beautiful she had inherited from a young Italian mother, daughter of a political refugee; her childhood had been spent in a remote little village in the West of England; half reluctantly she told me how she had brought herself up after her mother’s death and her father’s second marriage. Little was said of that, but I gathered that it had been a grief to her, a factor in her flight to the East. We were walking in the Circular Road then with Winifred in front leading her Pekingese by its blue ribbon, and we had it almost to ourselves except for a few natives passing slow and dignified on their own occasions, for fashionable Peshawar was finishing its last rubber of bridge, before separating to dress for dinner, and had no time to spare for trivialities and sunsets. “So when I came to three-and-twenty,” she said slowly, “I felt I must break away from our narrow life. I had a call to India stronger than anything on earth. You would not understand but that was so, and I had spent every spare moment in teaching myself India--its history, legends, religions, everything! And I was not wanted at home, and I had grown afraid.” I could divine years of patience and repression under this plain tale, but also a power that would be dynamic when the authentic voice called. That was her charm--gentleness in strength--a sweet serenity. “What were you afraid of?” “Of growing old and missing what was waiting for me out here. But I could not get away like other people. No money, you see. So I thought I would come out here and teach. Dare I? Would they let me? I knew I was fighting life and chances and risks if I did it; but it was death if I stayed there. And then--Do you really care to hear?” “Of course. Tell me how you broke your chain.”