"What did he say to you, Jan?"
As the shikari turned away Cuxson caught the girl's hands and crushed them up against his heart.
"I will tell you some day!"
"Tell me now!"
"No! not now! It is of love that I should have to speak, and in all these past weeks you have not let me touch your hand or speak to you of love. You have put a barrier between us, a barrier of a misplaced fear, which has grown higher and stronger since I have had to confess to failure in finding any trace of your old servant. India is wide, dear, and its villages uncountable, and I am not distressed over the empty return of these last months; all that worries me is, that while prowling about the Himalayas out of reach of the post, I never knew what had happened to you, or that you were in India."
Leonie sighed as she opened her hand and looked at the small bones.
"Tell me now, Jan!" she insisted.
"No! Leonie, I cannot. There will be no one near us when I do tell you, and except as a souvenir of that very fine old man, you need not keep them, because my love is a still greater and surer charm to bring you the great happiness they promise."
CHAPTER XXXII
"And thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, a byword."—The Bible.