confidence. He was the man, she believed, for her Stella. But he was
going up to Chitipur! Anything might happen! She leaned back again in the
carriage and cried defiantly to the stars.

"I am glad that he's going. I am very glad." And in spite of her
conscience her heart leaped joyously in her bosom.




CHAPTER V

THE QUEST


The next night Henry Thresk left Bombay and on the Wednesday afternoon he
was travelling in a little white narrow-gauge train across a flat yellow
desert which baked and sparkled in the sun. Here and there a patch of
green and a few huts marked a railway station and at each gaily-robed
natives sprung apparently from nowhere and going no-whither thronged the
platform and climbed into the carriages. Thresk looked impatiently
through the clouded windows, wondering what he should find in Chitipur if
ever he got there. The capital of that state lies aloof from the trunk
roads and is reached by a branch railway sixty miles long, which is the
private possession of the Maharajah and takes four hours to traverse. For
in Chitipur the ancient ways are devoutly followed. Modern ideas of speed
and progress may whirl up the big central railroad from Bombay to Ajmere.
But they stop at the junction. They do not travel along the Maharajah's
private lines to Chitipur, where he, directly descended from an important
and most authentic goddess, dispenses life and justice to his subjects