“You walk in your sleep, Leonie, by reason of the workings of an overwrought brain, that is all.  India is the problem, and your ayah is the answer. I think she frightened you somehow, made some deep impression on you, on your baby brain, and we are going to India to find her.  It’s very simple, dear, once find the cause we can easily find the remedy, and it will be much better if you come with me.  By the way, who gave you that cat’s-eye?”

He had made a slip.

“When did you see it?” answered Leonie quickly, “I never showed it to you!  Were—­were you down there near me, before you called?”

“No,” steadily lied the man, “but the thing slipped through your blouse one day—­it’s a brute.  Who gave it to you?”

“My ayah!  Do you know, I think you are quite wrong about her.  Auntie says Mother told her that she nearly broke her heart when I left India, seventeen years ago, and she writes to me regularly every three months.  Only last week I had a letter from——­”

“Do you speak Hindustani?” interrupted Cuxson abruptly, with a frown on his face.

“Not a word!”

“Or Sanskrit?”

“Oh! no, neither, but the letters are in English, evidently written by one of those letter writers, who get so much for each letter they write for the illiterate poor.  And in every one she says how she loves me and longs for my return, and although she is very happy in the service of some Ranee in the north of India, she wants to give it up and come to me.”

There was a pause, broken by the nearing thunder and the crash of the waves against the cliffs.

“Don’t let’s worry about that yet, dear, as everything is settled splendidly and——­”

But Leonie pulled away and stood facing him with her hands in his against his heart.

“Do you really love me?”

The whisper was almost lost in the tumult of the breakers beneath.

“Love you, Leonie, love you!”

“What would you forgive me through love?”

“Forgive you!  Everything!  Dishonour could not touch you, and everything else I should forgive!”

Leonie tried to speak as she looked past him to the little green track between the downs which led to the world, and all it contained for her; and he, obtuse male, content in the plans he had mapped out entirely to his own satisfaction, and having blissfully taken the girl’s consent to the programme for granted, failed to read the agony written across her face in capital letters.

“Tell me that you will be content, dear.  I’m rich enough, but nothing compared with—­oh! tell me, what do you like—­what do you want—­what do you really care for!”

She freed her hands and turned to look out to sea, where the day had been born in agony upon a bed of sullen, unbroken water.

Then she looked straight down at the waves flinging themselves against the cliffs, drenching her with spray, moaning, fretting at the barrier, retiring only to do the same thing over and over again.