‘The brute! Never mind—they’re not much use in a railway journey. You can pick up another at Bombay. Then I suppose I’d better get in.’
‘I suppose you better had. Unless you think of walking,’ she laughed, and he took the place beside her.
Ram Singh again unquestioningly took up the reins.
‘Nobody else going down?’
‘Not another soul. We might just as well have started together.’
‘Oh, well, we couldn’t tell. Beastly awkward if there had been anybody.’
‘Yes,’ she said, but thrust up her under lip indifferently.
Then, with the effect of turning to the business in hand, she bent her eyes upon him understandingly and smiled in frank reference to something that had not been mentioned. ‘It’s goodbye Simla, isn’t it?’ she said. He smiled in response and put his hand upon her firm, round arm, possessively, and they began to talk.
Ram Singh, all unaware, kept his horses at their steady clanking downward gallop, and Simla, clinging to the hilltops, was brushed by the first rays of the sun.
It came a gloriously clear morning; early riders round Jakko saw the real India lying beyond the outer ranges, flat and blue and pictured with forests and rivers like a map. The plains were pretty and interesting in this aspect, but nobody found them attractive. Sensitive people liked it better when the heat mist veiled them and it was possible to look abroad without a sudden painful thought of contrasting temperatures. We may suppose that the inhabitants of Paradise sometimes grieve over their luck. Even Madeline Anderson, whose heart knew no constriction at the remembrance of brother or husband at some cruel point in the blue expanse, had come to turn her head more willingly the other way, towards the hills rolling up to the snows, being a woman who suffered by proxy, and by observation, and by Rudyard Kipling.