Fact!

Very few women can see the difference between joyfully hoarding genuine antique pewter, and wearing a second-hand neglige.

So Leonie was fleeing home via Calcutta, and she sat without movement, hating herself and the world, even the man who, having taken her at her word, had left her alone to stumble as best she could along the crooked, lonely road which would end, as far as she could see, in a padded cell.

“How could you?” she suddenly cried aloud, and the natives made surreptitious signs, and withdrew to a certain distance out of respect to the disorder of her mind.  “How could you leave me!  Didn’t you know that it is because I love you so that I would rather die than let you share my curse?  But couldn’t you have done something, tried to follow that clue, gone somewhere, oh! done anything just to show that——!”

The rumble of wheels cut her agitation short, and drew the native element closer to the door, in order that it should be quite near the mem-sahib when she appeared—­with her purse in her left hand.

And while she sat on her bed, and later on in the train, striving to break the mental thongs which bound her to some intangible stake, Jan Cuxson was sitting in the secret places of the jungle temple, striving to break the bonds of raw hide by which he had found himself fastened to a ring in the wall.

As he struggled he speculated savagely upon that insensate sense of security, common to most Britishers, which had caused him to try and find the Hindu temple under the guidance of an unknown native.

He mentally reviewed his journey from the boat to the temple, fighting through the tiger-grass, breaking through the delicate impeding branches of the sundri trees, crushing the sundri breathers under his heavy boots as he tramped behind the guide, having failed to notice, owing to the resemblance that exists between one ordinary native and the next, that the guide and coolie of the jungle were not the guide and coolie of the paddle boat.

He remembered that once he had stopped dead and laid a detaining hand on the guide’s shoulder, as through the darkening forest had come a cry, eerie as it wailed through the shadows, to be taken up ahead of them, and echoed and re-echoed until it became faint in the distance and died away altogether.

“What’s that?”

The native had not hesitated.

“The cry, O Sahib, Protector of the poor, of the jungle owl as it seeks its food!”

Cuxson, unobservant for once, and anxious to get to the end of the trail again failed to notice that it was still far too light for any member of the owl family to be abroad.

Also, when he sat down on a fallen tree trunk to readjust his boot strap, he had mistaken for the booming of a huge jungle insect something which whizzed through the space where his head had been a second before.

It is true he had questioned the guide as to the route they were taking, pointing out that it was not the one traversed in the shikar.