And then Grace Arbuthnot was at another disadvantage. Her sentiment was a heavier weight to carry than Lesley's lack of it; and Jack Raymond's words had set her nerves jarring. So, at last, on the mother's excuse of going to see if Jerry were comfortably asleep, she left the drawing-room, and on her way upstairs, paused to listen at the dining-room door. As she stood there in her diamonds, her sea-green garments, trying to catch anything definite in the muffled voices within, she felt a sudden vast impatience at her sex; felt, as Lesley would not have felt, that it was a disadvantage. For the old revolt of womanhood used to be against nature; now it is against the custom which shackles nature. As she passed on up the wide stairs, the strange silence and solitude of an Indian house in which all service comes from outside, lay about her; but in Jerry's room the open window let in a sound. The most restless sound in the world, the rhythmic yet hurried beat of the little hour-glass drum used by the natives in their amusements. Rhythmic yet hurried, like the quickened throb of a heart. It came faintly, indefinitely, from the distance and darkness of the city; but Grace had been too long in India not to be able to picture for herself the environment whence it rose. She could see the murk of smoke and shadow, the light of flicker and flare on the circling faces round the shrilling voice or posturing figure of a woman. Was it a wedding? Or was it--the other thing? It might be either; for that intermittent noise of fireworks, which echoed at intervals like the report of guns, belonged to both. This time it was a fear of her own self that came to Grace Arbuthnot as she listened--a fear of her own sex--a fear of the hundreds of thousands of hearts beating away in the darkness around her; beating perhaps in rhythm to that restless sound. And so little might bring the restlessness to a heart! Her own gave quick assent as she looked down on the sleeping childish face, seen dimly by the rushlight set on the floor beside the muffled, sleeping figure of the child's bearer. For the sight brought back, in a second, that other sleeping face she had seen a few days before. Not that the two were outwardly alike; the likeness lay within. She took a step nearer, and then stood looking curiously, almost fearfully, at the child she had borne. She was one of the ninety and nine out of every hundred good women who pass through wifehood and motherhood thinking it their duty to ignore its problems--the problems which only good women can solve--and so it gave her a certain shock to realise that she had passed on that old love of hers to this child of another man. Yet, when one came to think of it, what else was heredity--if there was such a thing in the mind--but the passing on of one's admirations, one's ideals? The passing on from generation to generation of one's own affinity for good or evil; the slow evolution of the spirit of a race.