* * * * * "I wish we could go up to the source of the Irrawaddy River, where no white man has ever been," says Eleanor, laying her hand confidingly in Carol's. "I should not be afraid with you, dear--such a traveller, and knowing the country so well. How many years is it since you were last in India?" "Over seven. How did I drag through them without you?" he replies tenderly. "We had a glorious voyage, didn't we? and everybody was so nice to us. I remember, Carol, how frightened I felt when first you suggested this long journey, and promised to take me north of Burmah to this strange, uncivilised village, where I should have to eat nothing but rice, or shoot my own game. Of course you had been here before, and though it is so wild and out of the way, there are still some white people to remind us we are not all savages." "My dear, you must not call them 'savages,'" he says smiling. "They are really very nice, though a trifle odd and original; but that is what you like, I believe." "Oh! yes. I am quite in love with my black servants. I think they are ever so much more picturesque and pleasant than my Richmond acquaintances. They look on me as a white angel, which no one would have done at home," with a smile at her quiet humour. Eleanor's feelings by now are blunted to a certain extent, and she frequently jests on the wholesome horror with which her English friends must now regard "that reckless Mrs. Roche!" Yet there are times when the thought of her sin rises like a dark thundercloud over the sunshine of this life of love. She is standing in the low verandah of her bamboo house, looking out over a network of gorges, rifts, and ravines, precipices in peaks, with villages crowning each crest. The houses are thatched with long grass, which grows over the hills, while below in the valley the rice is cultivated in terraces. The villages are stockaded with bamboo, and the water runs through them in troughs of split bamboo. "The people are certainly very dirty," says Eleanor, watching an old woman with large amber earings, pounding rice, and talking to a dusky man in a blue turban. "Yes. They wear their clothes till they fall off, and never wash except when it rains. That man below is a noted warrior in these parts." "How do you know?" "You see the sword slung over his shoulder, with a bamboo hoop? Well, the tiger's hoop is a sign of distinction." "I wish the old woman would stop pounding. She makes my back ache to look at her. She has been making linen on a loom all day, and must be dreadfully tired." "Did you notice the bell on it?" "Yes. What was that for?" "So that her lord and master may know when she stops working."