"Oh! he isn't my servant," replied Boy's mother. "He is Muriel's. I can't think why she keeps him."
The cross-maker rose and held her work at arm's length. "Does any one really know why they do anything?" she asked. "Perhaps, as you say, he will steal my jewels some day--or murder me. But, as Boy says, he's awful clever, and one must be amused! Now I must go and put this up. Will you drive me to the church, Colonel Gould?"
"Better come in the victoria with me," said Boy's mother, hastily; "it is going to rain." This other woman, this childless wife with an unspeakable husband, must be guarded from herself.
"I don't think so," put in the Colonel, firmly. "Kunder! call my dogcart, and we can go round by my bungalow and pick the dhatura."
Kunder, passing on his errand, looked up curiously at the last word.
Colonel Gould gave back the look. "Queer customer! Shouldn't wonder if he's a Thug--they use dhatura poison to stupefy their victims, you know."
He spoke carelessly as they stood looking out at the bare patch of parched ground called by courtesy a garden. The lowering sky, of an even purplish grey, was so dark that the level lines of dust-laden sirus trees along the road showed light against it.
"I wish some one would stupefy me," said Muriel, with a sudden passion in her voice; to cover which she went on recklessly: "How I hate Christmas in India!--the sham of it--sham decorations--sham church, for it isn't real! The reality is outside among the poor folk in the fields and the towns, to whom Christmas is a day when we guzzle and they pay the piper!"
"My dear Muriel!"
"It's true! Think of it! Peace and goodwill? Isn't the whole station at daggers-drawing because one lady said another wasn't the best-dressed woman in India? Isn't your regiment, Colonel, ready to murder you? Then that camp, right in the middle of us Christians, with how many prisoners eating their hearts out? And Vile John--as Boy has been taught to call him--half mad in thinking of his children who have died. Oh, I know it is all inevitable--but think, just think of him wandering about this Christmas Eve, liable to be shot at sight. There's a Santa Claus for you!"