"Why! I'd completely forgotten it," she said aloud, turning the book sideways to look at an illustration. "The wonderful tomb Guy Dean insisted upon my visiting if I ever went to Benares. How beautiful! Must be the tomb of some ancestor of that young prince he was talking about. Oh! how beautiful, and—oh! how helpful! I suppose some Englishman must have left the book in the train by mistake."
She had picked up a bit of paper which had fallen from the book; a rough time-table with directions in English as to the best means of getting to the world-famed monument.
"That decides it," she said sleepily as she switched off the light, pulled a miniature mosquito net, deftly arranged by the ayah, over her head, and the sheet up to her neck. "We get to the station to-morrow—sometime—disembark—put luggage into cloak-room—find elephant and—and dâk bungalow—and—oh! almost full moon—how—how delicious—-ride out and see the—the——"
She slept, oblivious of the fact that she was carrying out implicitly the programme mapped out for her.
Travelling in India is real sport when the train doors are likely to swing open at no given spot, soft-footed natives to enter surreptitiously and disappear as quietly upon sight of your open eyes; and guards to clamour for your ticket, while a mob collects outside your door at the junction to look at the pretty unveiled mem-sahib awakened from her slumber by a dignified bearer with his offering of chotar hazri, which means the thrice blessed early tea-tray.
Her restless spirit was soothed by the rush of the train through the endless plain; strange scenes, strange sights wrenched her mind from the terrible question everlastingly throbbing in her brain; and her eye was not quick enough to distinguish one delicate oval face from another, or to notice that at each stopping place her ayah meandered down the length of the train to a compartment where, in consequence of his high caste and rank, a man sat utterly alone—unconcerned and totally oblivious of the screaming, chattering crowd upon the platform, of beggars, pilgrims, and bonâ fide native travellers.
True, for one moment at the station where she alighted for the world-famed tomb, she glanced back hurriedly at a native who placed himself between her and an unsightly epileptic; and she looked back once again as her intuition rapped out a message she did not grasp, and her ayah suddenly besought her help with the coolies.
A dilapidated tonga, drawn by a pony of the same description, took her and her servant to the dâk bungalow, built on a concrete platform in a jungle clearing about two miles outside the village.
There she gave carte blanche for the arrangement of the evening trip to the guide who materialised serenely, all smiles and extreme deference. Bathed, and fed, she had her hair brushed for half an hour by her ayah; refused the offer of massage, which process she abhorred, and turned in and slept the afternoon away upon her own bedding spread on a charpoy.
Later she bathed again, attired herself in a simple low-cut, white silk dress, dined, and wrapping herself in a heavy white Bedouin cloak, wedding present from Jill Wetherbourne, who had got it from her godmother in Egypt, seated herself on the verandah to await the arrival of whatever means of locomotion the guide had chosen to take her to the tomb.