“Her undies,” said a woman who, with the excuse of borrowing a book, had essayed to spy out the land of Leonie’s cabin.  “I saw her running ribbons in them—­the most ex-quisite crepe de Chine, hand embroidered and trimmed with real lace!”

“How de trop!” had answered a matron, whose household linge and personal lingerie showed complete only in the sections of finger napkins and undervests, as is the way of a careless, untidy woman’s linen stock.

“Well, that’s easily understood,” chimed in a third.  “After all she is trade.”

And the no’s had carried it.

Wherefore, although in ignorance of the verdict, she did exactly what every other woman did, and went where they went, she most certainly did not have what one would call a good time.  She loved the Maidan and golf at the Jodhpur Club, or Tollygunge, before breakfast; she cordially loathed shopping and duty calls; grudged the hours lost out of life in the daily afternoon siesta, and took part in dances, bridge, dinners, and all the usual monotonous effort to kill time, with the air of an indifferent, disgruntled statue.

Gossip was no joy to her, scandal she would not tolerate, and the women commenced the task of ostracism by means of half-uttered phrases and little invidious smiles; and most men voted her odd owing to a certain indescribable barrier which they invariably encountered when they approached her over impulsively, and which really did not tally with her enticing, bizarre beauty.

Yes! they voted her odd, certainly, but in the secret places of their hearts and bungalows some of them would ponder.

Had not the major sahib’s bearer curled himself up on the mat beneath the bed and gone to sleep, while the major sahib, after the ball, had sat in his shirt-sleeves upon that bed until three in the morning; and over and over again mentally slid up and down the room with supple, slender Leonie in his arms, where, in the earlier hours of the night, she had rested seemingly content for one half-second before he had let her go under the palms.

And, “Damn it all, she’s not a flirt,” did not a certain youthful sahib who worshipped openly at her shrine exclaim, as he thought, in the unpleasantly heated watches of the night, of that moment when she had smiled down sweetly into his adoring eyes, as his cheek brushed her hand while she was arranging her habit, and he her stirrup leather.

How were they to know that, distracted by an ever-increasing fear, and lost in an overwhelming love, Leonie had no more remembrance than the man in the moon of the fact that she had danced with the one, and smiled upon the other.

It was the final flare of the season in the shape of a ball at Government House; one of those mixed massed gatherings to which you are invited either on account of your rank, or your unblemished reputation, or the fact that you’ve had the forethought to inscribe your name in the visiting-book.