“Only as an amateur,” Traherne insisted.
The Raja let that pass. “I presume it is some misadventure—a most fortunate misadventure for me—that has carried you so far into the wilds beyond the Himalayas?”
“Yes,” Traherne assented ruefully. “We got lost in the clouds. Major and Mrs. Crespin were coming up from the plains to see their children at a hill station—”
“Pahari, no doubt?”
“Yes, Pahari—and I was rash enough to suggest that I might save them three days’ traveling, by taking them up in my aeroplane.”
“Madam is a sportswoman, then?” The Raja turned to Lucilla.
“Oh, I have been up many times,” she replied.
“Yes,” Crespin said with a tinge of sarcasm under the words, “many times.”
If Lucilla caught it, she gave no sign, and did not let it serve to swerve her from the subject. “It was no fault of Dr. Traherne’s that we went astray,” she told the Raja. “The weather was impossible.”
A smile of a new significance came in the narrow black eyes, but was not allowed to touch his lips. “Well,” he said amusedly, “you have made a sensation here, I can assure you. My people have never seen an aeroplane. They are not sure, simple souls”—he was laughing at them but there was affection in it, Traherne thought—“whether you are gods or demons. But the fact of your having descended in the precincts of a temple of our local goddess”—he motioned his hand towards the idol—“allow me to introduce you to her—is considered highly significant.”