So the newly married pair sailed a fortnight later for India; and the unsophisticated daughter of an obscure country parson found herself launched without preparation into a world that to her was completely bewildering. From the stagnation of English village existence, and from relative hardship, she went straight into the activities, contradictions, and comparative luxuries of life in a large Indian station, a life that, perhaps, has no actual parallel anywhere else on earth. CHAPTER IV MRS. GREAVES Mrs. Greaves stood on the platform of one of the largest railway stations in Upper India. The lights flashed down upon a pushing, shouting throng of dark-faced, turbaned humanity, for it was eight o'clock at night, and the mail train for Bombay was due to start in another few minutes. The chill, cold-weather mist of evening, creeping into the vast echoing station, seemed to compress the curious odours inseparable from an Eastern crowd--the sour exhalations, the commingling of spices and perfumes and garlic--and to prevent them from dispersing. A little group of English people stood outside the door of a first-class compartment, a saloon-shaped compartment that to those unaccustomed to travel in the East would perhaps have seemed luxurious; but in a country where journeys may last for days and nights on end a certain degree of comfort becomes a necessity. Mrs. Greaves had come to the station to see Mrs. Munro, her friend, and little Trixie Munro, her godchild, off to England; also, incidentally, to take the bereft husband back to her bungalow for dinner with herself and Captain Greaves. It would be cruel, she felt, to permit the poor man to return to a lonely meal in the house that would still breathe of the presence of wife and child. Within the compartment bedding had been laid out along the seats, luggage was heaped at one end--the loose, miscellaneous luggage of the Anglo-Indian traveller, brown canvas hold-alls, and clothes bags, sun hats, a tiffin basket, a water-bottle in a leather-case, and a lidless packing-case filled with odds and ends that might be needed on the journey down country. An ayah, enveloped in a scarlet shawl, was endeavouring to pacify the child, who, beside herself with excitement, was jumping up and down, and ordering her parents in shrill Hindustani to make haste and come inside the carriage, else they would assuredly be left behind. She had not understood as yet that Dadda must be left behind in any case.