"I can't ask Miss Stuart to give up her place in the car."
"Of course not; I'll join Ananda and his friends. They are travelling up by the special leaving in about an hour's time."
"You need not journey in their company. Now-a-days, when our blood is curdled by assassinations——"
He interrupted her.
"They are all right—three of the nicest fellows I know."
She made a little grimace, not noticing that a Hindu, faultlessly frock-coated and top-hatted, had approached on the other side of the motor, and was waiting for an opportunity to speak, waiting with the courtesy of good breeding that happily is not the monopoly of the European.
"Still, one cannot forget——" she mentioned the name of a well-known public man who had been done to death by an Oriental fanatic.
The blood rushed to the temples of the Hindu. He raised his hat as he said quietly—
"You must not suppose that we are all assassins, Miss Wenaston, any more than I may suppose you English to be all murderers like——" and he in his turn named a notorious criminal who had recently been convicted of a murder perpetrated under circumstances of peculiar cruelty.
"Of course not! I beg your pardon, Mr. Ananda. I ought not to have said it."