'Then why don't you?' asked Lesley, smiling; she and the aide-de-camp had become fast friends, chiefly over their mutual devotion to Grace Arbuthnot. 'They won't let us. They say it is likely to rouse ill-feeling and all that. And then,' he went on frankly, 'of course it wouldn't do to get licked too often, you know, and one can't expect our boys to collar men who do dumb-bells all day like those fellows do.' Grace, sitting beside Lesley, thought they might do worse. But, boys or men, the sports were good, and held half cantonments and not a few from the city, interested in the various events, while the sun sank slowly to the curiously limitless limit of the level horizon. Lateefa the kite-maker was there, amongst others, finding a sale for his airy nothingnesses betweenwhiles, as he passed through the crowd with that quaint cry of-- 'Use eyes and choose Eyes use and choose.' Jehân Aziz was there also, in his third-best brocade coat, and with a half-cringing, half-defiant avoidance of Mr. Lucanaster, who, red-tied as usual, was betting gloves with Mrs. Chris Davenant. For that, the lady in question told herself, was quite the correct thing to do; and as the ball which was to prove her admittance into the best society had not yet come off, Mrs. Chris, as Jack Raymond had predicted, was careful. Though in truth she found a strict adherence to etiquette somewhat slow. With an easier code and a greater inclination to scorn it, Sobrai Begum was finding the same thing in the half-empty bazaar, where she had been left in charge of a toothless old hag who had once enjoyed the doubtful dignity of Miss Leezie's position, but who, having grown too old for the post, had remained on in the house as a domestic drudge of the most exemplary pattern. The poor old soul, however, suffered from an all too intimate acquaintance with the gutters as they lay reeking in the chill dawns, when those for whom she worked lay still curled up in their wadded quilts. So, when an hour or so had been spent after the approved fashion of her kind, in cozening her charge out of ill-humour, the fever fiend seized on her, and laid her by the heels in a backyard, more than half-unconscious. Sobrai therefore, relaxed from surveillance, began to wonder sulkily how she had best utilise her freedom. She had been long enough with Miss Leezie to make her remember Lateefa's caution; to make her wonder if Dilarâm and the old ways were not best. There was no reason, nevertheless, why they should be so. She was a clever girl in her way, with an ancestry of pride as well as wickedness; and above all, of a fierce faculty for obtaining personal gratification.