'Do you think there will be one weally?' he asked, with quite a tremble of eagerness in his voice.
'No, Jerry, certainly not,' she replied quickly, vexed he should have heard; 'and if there were, there is no use in being frightened.'
His face flushed crimson. 'It--it isn't that,' he began, gripping her hand tighter, then paused; perhaps because at that moment a line of coloured fires swept in curves against the background of purple shadow to form the legend--'God bless our new Lieutenant-Governor.'
A hum of applause, not for the words, but the Roman candles and sulphur stars, rose from beyond the garden.
On the terrace, too, admiration was loud and the old Thakoor's delight was boundless. He was here, whispering Sir George that he had only been allowed two thousand rupees; there, apologising to the rest of the committee for imaginary shortcomings, or down in the smoke and noise below, urging the pyrotechnists to be quick, to spare no pains, to show the Huzoors what they could do.
'That will we!' muttered an underling as he stooped to his task; the letting off, like minute-guns, of the detonating maroons which the native loves.
And another man, as he bent to touch a fuse with his port-fire, gave a sinister laugh, and remarked under his breath that scarred necks could do without pearls!
So, in hot haste, the set pieces succeeded each other--the Catherine-wheels span, dropping coloured tears; the fire-fountains played; the great clouds of smoke, edged with many tinted reflections of the lights, drifted sideways, and beyond them the balloons sailed up one by one to form new constellations in the sky; but the curved rockets paused with a little sob of despair, and sank back, dropping the stars which they had hoped to set in high heaven.
And above the noise, the bustle, the popping of squibs and crackers, came the sound of an English military band and the minute-guns of the maroons.
Lesley Drummond on the lower terrace watching, listening, was conscious of a curiously new sense of enjoyment, almost exultation. Her life, the emotionally restricted life of the modern girl who, having freed herself from minor interests, has not yet found wider ones, had been, though she would never have admitted it, cold and grey. But to-night, for the first time, she realised that her nature held other possibilities. The dim darkness, the faint light, the mystery encompassing the mirth around her, even Jack Raymond's voice asking carelessly, as he passed, how she was getting on, made her feel dizzy with pleasure.