He turned back, looking half abstractedly upon the gleaming particles of glass. He shivered for the third time. Devil-business!
And so the gods, having no further use for Muhafiz Ali, merchant and loyal servant of the Raj, left him to wonder at the source of these ripples that had touched him; left him to grope behind the drop that had suddenly fallen upon this bewildering interlude; left him to dream of the house in Peshawar and the azure-necked peacock that strutted and shrilled like an angry Rajput.
Several days after Muhafiz All delivered the imitation Pearl Scarf to the sahib in Indore, the young woman who was marked of Destiny sat in a first-class carriage of the East Indian Railway, her attention divided between a green vellum volume propped against a gray-clad knee and the sun-blistered scenery that unreeled past the window.
An elderly gentleman from Devonshire who occupied the same carriage found himself wondering why his eyes invariably returned to the girl. This particular gentleman was past youthful sentimentalizing and not yet in those riper years when age casts regretful glances over its shoulder; therefore, being no psychometric, it puzzled him that this girl should compel his gaze. Was it the hair, in whose bronzen waves a slantwise ray of sunlight ignited little glints of red-gold? Or the white throat, full with young maturity? Suddenly she looked up, and he fathomed the secret of magnetism. Brown eyes that brought to mind a deep, rich wine held to the light--or poplar leaves just before snow. He felt something of cathedral-largeness behind those eyes, something vital and alive yet intensely spiritual. The warm strength of sunlight in great forests; tapers in altar-gloom. These things were there. And the gentleman from Devonshire thought of a daughter in Britain and smiled to himself, and forgot hot, heart-aching India.
The lights which he had glimpsed in the girl's eyes were the very beacons that had drawn her across leagues of water--lights that were first kindled in some voyaging ancestor whose frigate dropped anchor off old New Orleans, in the gilded days of Bienville; that grew dim in the tiresome process of heredity, and flamed anew, generations later, in this girl who sat in the railway carriage--lights that were almost smothered by the snuffers of Aristocracy and Tradition.