between doffing his ragged cap to a dissolute squire or parson, and
saluting his better on parade, could also see the selfishness of
leaving an honest girl to languish for him. Brown could not get a
living in England. So he told his girl to get a better man, swung
his canvas bag across his shoulder and marched away.

"What kind of a man is a better man than Bill?" she had wondered.
Men like Bill seem to have a knack of judging character, and of picking
girls who are as steadfast as themselves. So it is not to be wondered
at that almost before her tears were dry she had set about attempting
what few women of her type and time would have dreamed of. If Bill
had set her free, she reasoned, Bill had no more authority over her,
and she might do exactly what she chose. Bill could release, but
he could not make her take another man. So, for all that the local
yeomen, and local tradesmen even, haunted the little cottage on the
Downs, and pestered her with their attentions, no one supplanted Bill.

Bill could tell her--and had told her--that India was no country for
a white woman; that there were snakes there, and black men and tigers
and even worse. But, since he had set her free, if she could manage
it she was quite at liberty to brave the tigers and the snakes. And,
once there, she would see whether she was free or not, and whether
Bill was, either!

It took Bill Brown six years of constant honest effort to become a
sergeant. It took Jane Emmett six weeks of pride-consuming and
vexatious vigilance to procure for herself a job as nurse in a soldier-
family. And it took her six more years of unremitting diligence,
sweetened by all the attributes that seem desirable when nursing other
people's children and embittered by the shame of grudging patronage,