"I've been so foolish!" she whispered, in a choked voice. "Oh, so childish and small—while you've been big and fine and strong. Arnold Trent, forgive me! I thought because—because you didn't speak; because you didn't tell me of what I saw in your eyes—back there in Burma—that, like Sentimental Tommy, the glamour tarnished when you touch it—that you were just—play-acting—and, because the adventure was over, you—you...." She swallowed, then finished: "Oh, I've been such a foolish Grizel!"
... When they rode back into Gyangtse the distant, purple-black spurs of the Himalayas were swimming in the pallid luster poured from a flagon moon.
3
Serpents of tobacco smoke writhed in the room where Euan Kerth and the young District Agent had been talking since dinner; spiraled about the two tanned faces and dissolved, as if by magic, leaving a thin grayish haze.
"... If anyone else had told me that, Euan Kerth," said the young officer, breaking a long silence, "I wouldn't believe it!... And they're in those sacks! No wonder you wanted a dozen Gurkhas to guard 'em! Gad! Of course I'll lend you an escort! Why, if it were learned that we had 'em, here in this house, we'd be murdered before midnight! But go on, man, finish your story."
Kerth resumed. The golden roofs of Lhakang-gompa lived in his words; Shingtse-lunpo, with its maze of whitewashed houses. Another long silence followed when he finished. The serpents of smoke still crawled and lolled in the air. Cavendish spoke.
"Kerth, I wonder—" He broke off; the lonely hungering in his eyes was clouded by an expression of bewilderment. He cleared his throat; laughed. "Of course, it can't be so, but.... Well, about six months ago an old lama was sick in the Jong. They brought him to me, on a litter, just before he died—at his request. He told me something queer. He said that Lhassa was no longer the political center of Tibet, and that the man in the Potala was not the Dalai Lama, but a priest posing as the Dalai Lama. He said the real Dalai Lama was in another monastery—somewhere toward Mongolia—that there...." Again he broke off; laughed. "But of course there can't be anything to it."
And Euan Kerth, his face dimmed by the smoke from his cheroot, smiled his satanic smile.
"No, of course," he repeated, "there can't be anything to it."