“Please God!” said Roger, “we shall set you and your gems safe within the walls of Burdwán ere we turn our faces towards Calcutta, and that is all my friend Walter meant by his outburst.”
Her eyes fell until the long lashes swept the peach bloom of her cheeks, for the physical difficulties of the journey, instead of exhausting her, had added to her beauty by tinting with rose the lily white of her complexion.
“Is that so?” she murmured, and Walter, who knew that she questioned him, said instantly:—
“No other thought entered our minds.”
“It is well. I shall retain my trinkets a little while longer, it seems.”
She laughed quietly, with a note of girlish happiness in her mirth that he had not caught since the day of their first meeting in the Garden of Heart’s Delight.
“Now that you have repaired my imagined loss,” she said, “will you not be seated again, and tell me something of your country. I have heard that women there differ greatly from us in India. Are they very pretty? Do they grow tall, like Sainton-sahib?”
Here was a topic from which their talk might branch in any direction. Soon Walter was telling her of his mother, of life in London and the North, while a chance reference to his father led up to the story of Dom Geronimo’s crime, and the implacable hatred he bore towards even the son of his victim.
Nur Mahal followed the references to the Jesuit with close interest. When Mowbray would have passed to some other subject she interrupted him, and clapped her hands as a signal to one of her women, whom she bade summon Jai Singh, the Rajput chief of her guard.
“What was the story you heard on the road as we returned to Agra?” she asked when the rissalder stood before her. “It dealt with certain Christian priests who dwell in that city, and with others at Hughli, if I mistake not.”