to begin business by exposing the scandalous remissness of his
predecessor. The house was acquired on a falling market by a money-lender,
who eventually leased it to the Blaines on an eighty per cent. basis--
a price that satisfied them entirely until they learned later about local proportion.

The front veranda faced due east, raised above the garden by an eight-foot
wall, an ideal place for sleep because of the unfailing morning breeze.
The beds were set there side by side each evening, and Mrs. Blaine--
a full ten years younger than her husband--formed a habit of rising in
the dark and standing in her night-dress, with bare feet on the utmost
edge of the top stone step, to watch for the miracle of morning. She
was fabulously pretty like that, with her hair blowing and her young figure
outlined through the linen; and she was sometimes unobserved.

The garden wall, a hundred feet beyond, was of rock, two-and-a-half
men high, as they measure the unleapable in that distrustful land; but
the Blaines, hailing from a country where a neighbor's dog and chickens
have the run of twenty lawns, seldom took the trouble to lock the little,
arched, iron-studded door through which the former owner had come
and gone unobserved. The use of an open door is hardly trespass
under the law of any land; and dawn is an excellent time for the
impecunious who take thought of the lily how it grows in order to
outdo Solomon.

When a house changes hands in Rajputana there pass with it, as well
as the rats and cobras and the mongoose, those beggars who were
wont to plague the former owner. That is a custom so based on ancient
logic that the English, who appreciate conservatism, have not even
tried to alter it.