It was a very simple thing; only a piece of wax. How long he sat there staring at it he did not realise. The yellow haze outside grew ruddier with the sinking of the sun, the water-carrier, shadowed by a white-robed aspirant to the dead factotum's duties, hovered about the verandah expectantly.
'What do you want, you fool?' bawled George, looking up, surprised at his own anger, surprised that anything should touch him save the thought that _she_ had known--must have known--that _she_ had done it, must have done it.
The man edged in through the screen, signing to the white-robed one to follow his example.
'Only to bring the Huzoor this,' he began noisily. 'Only to bring this proof of honesty to the feet of justice. Lo! it was found even now by this man with a foresight and quickness to be commended. In the sahib's own room, Huzoor, beneath the matting, thus causing the face of the big sahib's ill-begotten servant to be blackened by reason of his base insinuation of theft! Theft! How can there be theft in a house where the water-carrier is as I am, and the kit will be as this one--mine own wife's brother, Huzoor----'
George broke out suddenly into dull laughter, 'Oh! go to blazes with your wife's brother--put the thing down there on the table, I tell you, and go--go--do you hear?'
Anger, and something more than anger was back in his tone ere he ended, and the water-carrier, knowing his master's voice, fled. The white-robed one with the courage of ignorance risked all by a salaam.
'At what hour will the Huzoor please to dine?'
The young man looked at him curiously, feeling that the world was past his comprehension.
As well this fool as another--as well to-morrow as to-day. Everything was trivial of course, and yet the trivial commonplace interruption had somehow brought home the reality of what had happened to the lad, and his head sank on his crossed arms once more in utter dejection. _She_ might have told him, warned him. Surely when he had promised she might have done so much for his sake, and Dan's--by the way, what was it that Dan had lost and that chattering idiot had brought in with him? George's right hand trembled a little as it reached over the table to take a plain gold locket on a slender gold chain. It was familiar enough to him. Dan wore it day and night, and many a time had George chaffed him about the young woman, so it was no wonder the dear old man had been vexed at the thought of losing it. Losing it? or losing her? In the keen thrust of this thought, the locket slipped through George's fingers, and falling, opened. So it lay, face upwards, while the boy sat staring out into the room blindly, intent on the remembrance that after all it was not a case of whether a man or a woman should suffer; it was one woman or another. The woman _he_ loved or the woman _Dan_ loved. A hundred thoughts beset him, but, analysed, they all resolved themselves to this: his love or Dan's. To save _her_ from even a breath of scandal he was willing to bear the blame; but how could this be without also imperilling Dan's future? No! if the worst came; if he could find no way--yet surely, surely, there must be some way, some simple way--of taking all the responsibility on his shoulders; then _she_ must be brave; _she_ must tell the truth and save this woman whom Dan loved--whose face lay there in the locket. His eyes sought it mechanically----