“She oughtn’t to leave!” she declared, plaintively. “It’s a shame! Here we are, just beginning the semestre, and she’s only half through her college course anyway, and just because her father wants her she has to give up everything and go.”
“Yes, and you know she’ll be sure to have jungle-fever or get bitten by a cobra or something, and die,” suggested someone cheerfully, if a trifle vaguely.
The girl lying on the tiger-skin looked up.
“I know why her father wants her,” she began calmly. “There is an officer—young, handsome, well born, a fine place in Surrey or Devon or Kent, been in the family for generations, old uncle, no children—just the thing for her. Her father will take her up to some place in the Himalayas to spend the summer, and he will arrange for the handsome, young, etc., officer to be there, and next fall we will receive the cards. It sounds just like one of Kipling’s stories, doesn’t it?”
They were all laughing by the time she had finished, but The Beauty, looking at the girl beside her, suddenly stopped smiling. There was a conscious flush on Miss Lavington’s face which set her to thinking, and then she glanced over to the big Scotch girl and waited an instant.
“Tell us all about it,” she said finally to Miss Lavington. The girl looked up quickly and then dropped her eyes again.
“There isn’t much to tell,” she began. The others were listening now. Even Kan Ato, smiling in her pensive, oriental way, leaned far forward so as not to lose a word.
“He isn’t rich and he hasn’t any place in Surrey—or anywhere else that I know of, except perhaps in India,” she went on. “But he is young and handsome. We used to know each other when we were children—he is a sort of cousin—but I haven’t seen him for years. We used to be very much in love with each other.” She smiled. “My father writes me that he says he is still in love with me, and so—perhaps we are to be married.”
“I knew it,” sighed the girl on the tiger-rug, in a satisfied sort of way.
The Beauty looked at the English girl curiously. “And you haven’t seen him for years? and yet you think of marrying him! How do you know you will love him now?—you are both changed—you may be two totally different people from the children who fell in love.” She had spoken vehemently and quickly, and Miss Lavington gazed at her with languid surprise.