"Great Scott! The woman must be mad," he ejaculated, bringing his hand down upon the table; all of which afforded huge if secret delight to the Babu, whose keen native scent for an intrigue had led him to put two and two together--the receipt of the letter in a feminine hand, and the bewilderment and disgust evoked thereby in his master. Good cause indeed had the latter for both. For the writer, after referring to their quarrel, lightly, daintily and in a prettily repentant way, proceeded to set forth that an excellent opportunity to join him having now occurred in the shape of some friends who were returning to India, she was coming out immediately--would, in fact, already have sailed by the time he received this letter, and that they could be married at Bombay when she landed, or from her friends' house at Poonah. Then there was a good deal that was very high sounding and gracious about turning over a new leaf and learning to understand each other better and so forth, with a deft rounding off of affection to close the missive effectively and clinchingly. No wonder he was dazed. "You can go now, Babu," he said. The Bengali rose and salaamed. There was going to be some fun now about some mem-sahib, he was thinking to himself with an inward chuckle, for he had seen that kind of thing before. Raynier sat there thinking, and thinking hard. What on earth was the meaning of it all? He went over in his own mind that parting scene. There was no sort of ambiguity about it, he decided; no loophole or possibility of doubt that it was absolute and final. He recalled her own words, "Very well, then. It is your doing, your choice, remember." There was no sort of reserve, no double meaning there, even if her silence ever since had not shown that she had considered her acquiescence final. And now she wrote coolly announcing her intention of coming out, and marrying him straight off hand. Marrying him! It is possible that never until that moment had he so completely realised the intense feeling of emancipation which had been with him day and night since the breaking off of that most mistaken understanding. Of late, too, it had been stronger still upon him, yet now it was the strongest of all. The thing was preposterous--in fact, preposterous was hardly the word for it. But what was to be done? To suffer himself to be led as a sheep to the slaughter was simply and entirely out of the question. But the unpleasantness of it all, the scandal it would create, the ridiculous and even scurvy position in which it would place himself-- why, it was intolerable!