All very pretty and possible, no doubt; it sounded good, but it was no longer his sort of a project. This wasn’t for the product of three generations of hardware merchants and manufacturers. Funny, he thought, how he had ever accepted visionary stuff like this. He would write Miss Claes some time how he had failed, but not now. On the night train, he felt India closing about him really for the first time. Once when the train stopped, he smelled the altogether indescribable earthiness of hills that had been sun baked all day, now letting it be known through the moistness of the night. It was vaguely like home to him; not home in America, but home on earth again, the faintest symptom of his reallegiance to life here, only known to one coming up out of sickness. In the early morning he lay for a while after awakening in a sort of bodily peace. It was as if he had really rested a little, as if he had left behind some utterly miserable part of himself in the red room at Bombay. “A bit questionable,” he muttered whimsically, with the trace of a smile, “a bit shabby and questionable to leave a bundle, a black bundle like that, in Number Five--for some one else to stumble over.” He fell asleep again and reawoke with a curious sentence on his lips; something that he had forgotten a long time, something that Miss Claes used to say: “Nobody knows Nagar--nobody.” “Nobody ever will,” he added, “if he doesn’t talk any more than he used to.” Again at breakfast the faintest little quiver of organic ease stole into him. The earth was very bright outside and the pot of tea that had been brought tasted actually sane. He had the feeling of being on the way somewhere, of having escaped something, as he watched India slip by from the window of his compartment.... Then Ahmedabad, the station, a Hindu in white garments, almost taking him in his arms--laughing, talking like an American--Nagar talking! XXIV MISS CLAES SPEAKS ONE Sunday morning about three weeks after the luncheon with John Higgins, during which Rufus Melton came to the Chop House, Pidge found Miss Claes alone in the basement front. “We’d like to come here to live. Is there any chance?” she asked. “Yes, it can be managed, I think.” Pidge regarded her with a kind of cold fixity and added: “We were married night before last. Rufe seems willing enough to come here. I hate to leave this house, but I didn’t think you had the rooms.” “I’ll make a place for you; a little place, at least. But, Pidge----” “Yes?” “Why haven’t you come to me all this time?” “I know how fond you are of Dicky Cobden. I haven’t hoped any one could understand.” “Being fond of Richard Cobden doesn’t make me less fond of you.”