She sat up beside him, her slender figure swaying a little with the motion of the cart, and looked about her with a light in her grey eyes that seemed the reflection of her mood. He thought her chatter artificial; but it was genuine enough. She always felt more than her usual sense of irresponsibility with him in their afternoon drives. The world lay all about them and lightened their relation; he became, as a rule, the person who was driving, and she felt at liberty to become the person who was talking.
“There!” she exclaimed, as three or four coolie women filed, laughing, up to a couple of round stones under a pipal tree by the roadside, and took their brass lotas from their heads and carefully poured water over the stones. “Fancy one’s religious obligations summed up in a cooking-potful of Hughli water! Are those stones sacred?”
“The author of ‘The Modern Influence of the Vedic Books,’” she suggested demurely, “should be quite sure. He should have left no stone unturned.”
She regarded him for a moment, and, observing his preoccupation, just perceptibly lifted her eyebrows. Then she went on: “But perhaps big round stones under pipal trees that like libations come in the second volume. When does the second volume appear?”
“Not until Sir Griffiths Spence comes out again and this lunatic goes back to Hassimabad, I fancy. I want an appropriation for some further researches first.”
The most enthusiastic of Mr. Ancram’s admirers acknowledged that he was not always discreet.
“And he won’t give it to you—this lunatic?”
“Then,” she said, with a ripple of laughter, “he _must_ be a fool!”
She was certainly irritating this afternoon. Ancram gave his Waler as smart a cut as he dared, and they dashed past Lord Napier, sitting on his intelligent charger in serious bronze to all eternity, and rounded the bend into the Strand. The brown river tore at its heaving buoys; the tide was racing out. The sun had dipped, and the tall ships lay in the after-glow in twos and threes and congeries along the bank, along the edge of Calcutta, until in the curving distance they became mere suggestions of one another and a twilight of tilted masts. Under their keels slipped great breadths of shining water. Against the glow on it a country-boat, with its unwieldy load of hay, looked like a floating barn. On the indistinct other side the only thing that asserted itself was a factory chimney. They talked of the eternal novelty of the river, and the eternal sameness of the people they met; and then he lapsed again.