"Do you see those?" cried Baby turning, all her ill-humour forgotten in her desire to impart a thrilling piece of information to Major Bethune as he walked behind her. "Do you see those funny marks? Those are supposed to be made by the hands of the queens, when they came down to be burned. Ugh! I say, Aunt Rosamond, are not you rather glad you are not an ancient Indian princess, and that Runkle is not an old rajah, and that you've not got to look forward to frizzle on his pyre?"
"You forget," came Rosamond's dreamy voice in reply, "I should not have been alive to grace Sir Arthur's pyre. My ashes would have mingled with other ashes long, long before.... Oh, I'm not so sure," she went on, again fitting a delicate hand into the sinister prints, "I am not sure that it was not a kind law in the end."
"Gracious!" cried the irrepressible Aspasia, with a shriek and a laugh. And then she whispered, all bubbling mischief, into Bethune's ear: "The poor Runkle, he is not as bad as all that, after all!"
Then, at sight of his face, she suddenly fell grave; and the two stood looking at each other. Bethune had first been startled by Lady Gerardine's look and accents even more than by the words themselves. The next moment, however, he mentally shrugged the shoulder of contempt.
Whom did she think to take in by her affectation of sensibility, this languid, self-centred creature in the midst of her chosen luxury?
Thus, when his eyes met Aspasia's, they were sad with the scorn of things, sad for the sordid trickeries of the soul of her on whom the love of his dead friend had been lavished.
Sir Arthur, with touching unconsciousness of the interlude, was once again affectionately sustaining his wife. Then, as the procession moved on once more, Baby, troubled and discomfited--she could have hardly explained why--moved childishly close to Raymond Bethune, and shivered a little.
"I am glad to be getting away from this haunted place and this uncanny country," she whispered again. "I feel sure I should have ended by making one of these dreadful natives stick a knife into me. I am always plunging in upon their feelings and offending their castes, and all the rest of it. Just look at Saif-u-din's face--Runkle's new secretary--I never saw such a glare as he threw upon us all just now. I suppose he thought we were making fun of their precious suttee!" Aspasia's idea of native distinctions was still of the vaguest.