that. Also, incidentally, it gives none of her charm. I never
heard any one get any further than that she was "oddly
attractive" - let us leave it at that. She was certainly
attractive to me.

She was the governess of little Winifred Meryon, whose father
held the august position of General Commanding the Frontier
Forces, and her mother the more commanding position of the
reigning beauty of Northern India, generally speaking. No one
disputed that. She was as pretty as a picture, and her charming
photograph had graced as many illustrated papers as there were
illustrated papers to grace.

But Vanna - I gleaned her story by bits when I came across her
with the child in the gardens. I was beginning to piece it
together now.

Her love of the strange and beautiful she had inherited from a
young Italian mother, daughter of a political refugee; her
childhood had been spent in a remote little village in the West
of England; half reluctantly she told me how she had brought
herself up after her mother's death and her father's second
marriage. Little was said of that, but I gathered that it had
been a grief to her, a factor in her flight to the East.

We were walking in the Circular Road then with Winifred in front
leading her Pekingese by its blue ribbon, and we had it almost to
ourselves except for a few natives passing slow and dignified on
their own occasions, for fashionable Peshawar was finishing its
last rubber of bridge, before separating to dress for dinner, and