Rose looked at herself in her dusty habit. She would have to go down to dinner in it, and challenge comparisons with Gwen in her silks and tinsel. Why should she? No one would care, no one would have a right to care if she did stay in her room with a headache. The next instant she was ashamed of the impulse. What did it matter?--they were welcome to their opinion. As for her, she would adopt no feminine excuse; she would leave those little devices to men's women. So she brushed her habit, and went out, with a heightened colour, to join the others. CHAPTER IX Rose Tweedie's sneer against men's women lacked point, since it so happened that Mrs. Boynton, in the opposite corner-room of the pavilion, was, at the very moment, setting aside the temptation of pleading a headache as an excuse for not appearing at dinner. And she had more reason to seek quiet than the girl, though a new dress lay ready on the bed; for Gwen loved to dazzle her world, and had spent some of her leisure in instructing a native tailor how to run up a web of coarse native muslin bought in the bazaar into a very decent semblance of a fashionable garment. But the pleasure of the trick had gone out of it. Something had happened. Something incredible, yet, given the surroundings, natural enough. Something about which she must make up her mind. It seemed scarcely a minute ago since she had passed in swiftly to the solitude of her room in order to think. She, Gwen Boynton, in native dress, with a white scared face and something in her hand. Now she had to pass out of that room again as an Englishwoman, and the transition left her oddly undecided. Indeed, as she paused for a moment ere taking the plunge, with one hand on the embroidered draperies doing duty as a door, it seemed almost as if she were awaiting some command, some voice which would relieve her of responsibility. Then she smiled and passed on to meet the surprised admiration of her little world; for she had never looked better in her life, and she knew it. The creamy muslin suited her in its careless folds, her excitement showed itself becomingly in flushed cheeks and bright eyes, and the chorus of wonder at her cleverness made her gracious beyond compare. They had been away so long, she said, airily, that she had had to amuse herself somehow, and were there not miles of muslin to be bought in every bazaar, and many men to put stitches into it? Any one could have done it. Rose, listening with a certain contempt in her look, told herself that Gwen said truth; any one could have done it who thought it worth while to take so much trouble for the sake of personal effect; yet a regret rankled somewhere, mingling with the resentment which came as Gwen called attention, somewhat garishly, to more of her good works. Did they not admire the room? When Colonel Tweedie had gone off to the Diwân she had consoled herself by pulling about the furniture; and did not the Ayôdhya pot look sweet on the