CHAPTER IV.

THE VEILED ROSEBUD OF DELHI.





The October winds were whirling the pine needles down the mountain
defiles in the bracing Alpine autumn, as Alan Hawke sped on past
Suez, gliding on through the stifling furnace heat of the Red Sea,
past Mocha, and dashing along through the Bridge of Tears, to Aden.
He left at Suez, and also at the Eastern Gibraltar of haughty Albion,
the brief letters for his mysterious employer, and he mentally
arranged the social gambit of his reappearance at Delhi in the nine
days before the Sepoy steamed into the island-dotted bay of Bombay.

Sternly shunning, on his arrival, the local sirens, whose songs of
old fell so sweetly upon his ear, the determined Major sped away at
once for Allahabad. He was on shaking social quagmires at Bombay.
There were sundry little threads of the past still left hanging
out in the shape of stray urban indebtedness, and he now scorned to
throw away a single one of the crisp Bank of England notes showered
upon him by Fortune. He was growing sadly wise. He had lately mused
over the old motto, "Lucky at cards--unlucky in love!" The cool
provision of the funds at Lausanne by Berthe Louison, her separate
route to Delhi, her business-like coldness in their strangely frank
relations, all these things proved to him that he was to be only
an intelligent tool; not a trusted friend in the little drama about
to open at the old capital of Oude.