“No,” she said, and she actually counterfeited a smile.  “No.  It’s all right.”

“I asked more than I had a right to ask,” he continued remorsefully.  “I am sorry.  I have lived too much amongst men.  That’s my trouble.  One becomes inconsiderate to women.  It’s ignorance, not want of good-will.  Look!” To distract her thoughts he began to point her out houses and people which were of interest.

“Do you see that sign there, ’Bahadur Gobind, Barrister-at-Law, Cambridge B.A.,’ on the first floor over the cookshop?  Yes, he is the genuine article.  He went to Cambridge and took his degree and here he is back again.  Take him for all in all, he is the most seditious man in the city.  Meanly seditious.  It only runs to writing letters over a pseudonym in the native papers.  Now look up.  Do you see that very respectable white-bearded gentleman on the balcony of his house?  Well, his daughter-in-law disappeared one day when her husband was away from home—­disappeared altogether.  It had been a great grief to the old gentleman that she had borne no son to inherit the family fortune.  So naturally people began to talk.  She was found subsequently under the floor of the house, and it cost that respectable old gentleman twenty thousand rupees to get himself acquitted.”

Ralston pulled himself up with a jerk, realising that this was not the most appropriate story which he could have told to a lady with the overstrained nerves of Mrs. Oliver.

He turned to her with a fresh apology upon his lips.  But the apology was never spoken.

“What’s the matter, Mrs. Oliver?” he asked.

She had not heard the story of the respectable old gentleman.  That was clear.  They were riding through an open oblong space of ground dotted with trees.  There were shops down the middle, two rows backing upon a stream, and shops again at the sides.  Mrs. Oliver was gazing with a concentrated look across the space and the people who crowded it towards an opening of an alley between two houses.  But fixed though her gaze was, there was no longer any fear in her eyes.  Rather they expressed a keen interest, a strong curiosity.

Ralston’s eyes followed the direction of her gaze.  At the corner of the alley there was a shop wherein a man sat rounding a stick of wood with a primitive lathe.  He made the lathe revolve by working a stringed bow with his right hand, while his left hand worked the chisel and his right foot directed it.  His limbs were making three different motions with an absence of effort which needed much practice, and for a moment Ralston wondered whether it was the ingenuity of the workman which had attracted her.  But in a moment he saw that he was wrong.

There were two men standing in the mouth of the alley, both dressed in white from head to foot.  One stood a little behind with the hood of his cloak drawn forward over his head, so that it was impossible to discern his face.  The other stood forward, a tall slim man with the elegance and the grace of youth.  It was at this man Violet Oliver was looking.