"It wasn't your fault," she said, still in that odd hard voice. "You had the mare in hand; she didn't stir an inch. It is a dreadful thing to happen, but"--she threw her head back a little, her wide eyes narrowed as a frown puckered her smooth forehead--"it isn't as if we could have prevented it. The thing had to be."
She might have been the incarnation of Fate itself as she glanced down at the dead child in the dust, at the living one reaching from its mother's arms to touch its sister curiously, at the slow tears of the mother herself as she acquiesced in the eternal fitness of things; for a girl more or less was not much in the mud hovel, where she and her man lived hardly, and the Huzoors would doubtless give rupees in exchange, for they were just. She wept louder, however, when with conventional wailing the women from the clustering huts joined her, while the men, frankly curious, listened to the groom's spirited description of the incident.
"You had better go, Allie; you do no good here," said the Major almost roughly. He was anxious to get through with it all; he was absorbed in it.
So the man who had said he was going to tell his wife to cut Mrs. Gissing had to help her into the dog-cart.
"It was horrible, wasn't it?" she said suddenly when, in silence, they had left the little tragedy far behind them. "We were going an awful pace, but you saw he had the mare in hand. He is awfully strong, you know." She paused, and a reflectively complacent smile stole to her face. "I suppose you will think it horrid," she went on; "but it doesn't feel to me like killing a human being, you know. I'm sorry, of course, but I should have been much sorrier if it had been a white baby. Wouldn't you?"
She set aside his evasion remorselessly. "I know all that! People say, of course, that it is wicked not to feel the same toward people whether they're black or white. But we don't. And they don't either. They feel just the same about us because we are white. Don't you think they do?"
"The antagonism of race----" he began sententiously, but she cut him short again. This time with an irrelevant remark.
"I wonder what your wife would say if she saw me driving in your dog-cart?"
He stared at her helplessly. The one problem was as unanswerable as the other.
"You had better drive round the back way to the Fair," she said considerately. "Somebody there will take me off your hands. Otherwise you will have to drive me to the Club; for I'm not going home. It would be dreadful after that horrid business. Besides, the Fair will cheer me up. One doesn't understand it, you know, and the people crowd along like figures on a magic lantern slide. I mean that you never know what's coming next, and that is always so jolly, isn't it?"