He gave a long shuddering sigh like that of a child which has exhausted itself with crying, and then was still.
"Mem-Sahib is very good," he said softly. "But he had the right——"
"He had not," she flashed back fiercely. "What gives him the right?"
"If Mem-Sahib were not a stranger she would know," he answered in his broken voice.
She struck her knee with her clenched hand in a storm of anger.
"There is no law——" she began.
"There is a custom, Mem-Sahib," he interrupted. "I think many of them were sorry, but had I turned on him and struck him they would have flung themselves on me. That is the difference."
"You are as good as he," she protested recklessly. "If you had a chance you would be more than he is. Major Tristram has told me——"
"There are barriers that Mem-Sahib would be the first to remember," he persisted.
But the fire of her outraged chivalry burnt fiercer in the wind of his opposition.