"Why did you follow me?" he demanded, as Tambusami, sweat flowing from every pore of his brown face, salaamed.
"My orders, O Presence!"
"Whose orders?"
"The Presence knows!"
Trent thought a moment. Then: "I object to it."
Tambusami smiled broadly. "But, O Presence, it is for your good that I follow—to protect you!"
And knowing it was useless to tell him he lied, the Englishman dismissed him curtly.
Trent spent an idle afternoon. He did not leave the hotel, for he feared that he would encounter other acquaintances, as he had met Ayrton, and with Tambusami tracking him it might make more insecure his position. To be sure, Sarojini Nanjee knew he was Arnold Trent—but did Tambusami?
As he lay sprawled across his bed, enjoying the inactivity and listening abstractedly to the sounds from the street, a recollection of the bronze-haired girl insinuated itself into his thoughts. Subconsciously, he wondered why the remembrance of her came to him. He hadn't seen her since she entered the carriage at Benares Cantonment; didn't know whether she left the train along the route or in Calcutta. Queer that this girl should have crossed the border of mere observation. Yet, had he analyzed it, he would have known the reason. The world, that is, the great firmament of existence around his immediate sphere, was to him a scroll of faces. Now and then some countenance was lifted from the multitude—a swift glimpse of eyes in the dusk, eyes he would never see again, and for many nights afterward, when he sat alone with his pipe and the stars, he would spin webs of glamour. A quixotic person, this Trent.... The girl, then, was one of the lifted faces. Skin of old ivory hue, he mused, and hair—now, just what color was it? His imagination supplied a simile. Golden, with little flickerings of auburn—like firelight on bronze. The figure rather pleased him. Firelight on bronze. A contrast to Sarojini Nanjee. One the jungle orchid, blossom of purple shadows; the other ... well, the type one liked to picture at a piano in a dusk-deepened room, with hands gleaming pale as moonlight....
Sentimentalism, he concluded. And dropped off to sleep.