BOOK I.



PROLOGUE.


"For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world
and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for
his soul?"

At Surat, by a window of his private office in the East India
Company's factory, a middle-aged man stared out upon the broad river
and the wharves below. Business in the factory had ceased for the
day: clerks and porters had gone about their own affairs, and had
left the great building strangely cool and empty and silent.
The wharves, too, were deserted--all but one, where a Hindu sat in
the shade of a pile of luggage, and the top of a boat's mast wavered
like the index of a balance above the edge of the landing-stairs.

The luggage belonged to the middle-aged man at the window: the boat
was to carry him down the river to the _Albemarle_, East Indiaman,
anchored in the roads with her Surat cargo aboard. She would sail
that night for Bombay and thence away for England.

He was ready; dressed for his journey in a loose white suit, which,
though designed for the East, was almost aggressively British.