"Sure, don't we look like a State Banquet at Buckingham Palace or a charity dinner at the Dublin Mansion House?" said Burke, looking around the company gathered about the oval dining-table. He was seated beside Miss Benson, who was on the host's right and facing the Amban on his left.
At the Durbar Wargrave had noticed that the Chinaman stared all the time at the girl, and now during the meal he seemed to devour her with an unpleasant gaze, gloating over the beauties of her bared shoulders and bosom until she became uncomfortably conscious of it herself. The unveiled flesh of a white woman is peculiarly attractive to the Asiatic, the better-class females of whose race are far less addicted to the public exposure of their charms than are European ladies. While the Deb Zimpun touched nothing but water the Amban drank champagne, port and liqueurs freely—even the untravelled Chinaman is partial to European liquors—yet they seemed not to affect him. But his slanted eyes burned all the more fiercely as their gaze was fixed on the girl opposite him.
He endeavoured to engage her in conversation across the table, and appeared ready to resent anyone else intervening in the talk as he dilated on the gaieties and pleasures of life in London, Berlin and Paris, where he had been attached to the Chinese Embassies. He glared at Burke when the doctor persisted in mentioning the panther's visit during the previous night, for the conversation at their end of the table then turned on sport. A chance remark of Miss Benson on tiger-shooting made Wargrave ask:
"Have you shot tigers, too, like Mrs. Dermot? And I've never seen one outside a cage!"
The girl smiled, and the Colonel answered for her.
"Miss Benson has got at least six. Seven, is it? More than my wife has. And among them was the famous man-eater of Mardhura, which had killed twenty-three persons. The natives of the district call her 'The Tiger Girl.'"
"Troth, my name for you is a prettier one, Miss Benson," said Burke laughing.
She made a moue at him, but said to the subaltern:
"Cheer up, Mr. Wargrave, you've lots of time before you yet. You oughtn't to complain—you've only been a few days here and you've already got a splendid bison. And they're rare in these parts."
"We'll have to find him a tiger, Muriel," said their host. "When you hear of a kill anywhere conveniently near, let me know and we'll arrange a beat for him."