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the West are still in the junior forms at school. No one had ever treated him as anything but an equal or kept him immured in a nursery atmosphere. He had had the run of his father's camp from the moment he could crawl, and lived his short life among adults who had, by and large, treated him as an adult – though a privileged one, because they loved him. Had it not been for Hilary and Akbar Khan, he would probably have been spoiled. But though their methods had differed, they had both taken pains to prevent his becoming a pampered brat, Hilary because he could not have endured whining or tantrums and preferred his son to behave from the first as an intelligent human being, and Akbar Khan because he intended the boy to be a commander of armies, a man whom men would one day follow to the death, and such are not the products of a spoilt and over-indulged childhood.
    Sita had been the only one who ever spoke to him in baby-talk or sang him childish songs, for Akbar Khan had early impressed it upon him that he was a man and must not allow himself to be molly-coddled. So the songs and the baby-talk had been a secret between Ash and his foster-mother, and it was partly because they shared that secret that he accepted the necessity of keeping other things secret, and had not betrayed them both at the start of their ill-fated journey to Delhi. Sita had told him that he must not talk of the ‘Burra-Sahib’ and Uncle Akbar, or the camp and all the things they were leaving behind them, and he had obeyed her, but as much from shock and bewilderment as obedience to her wishes. The swiftness with which his world had dissolved, and the incomprehensible manner of its going, was a black pool of shadow into which he would not look for fear of seeing things he did not want to remember: dreadful things, like Uncle Akbar being thrust into a hole in the ground and the earth piled over him; and the almost worse shock of seeing the ‘Burra-Sahib’ weeping over that rough mound, when how many times had both he and Uncle Akbar said that tears were only for women?
    It was better to turn one's back on such things and refuse to recall them; and Ash had done just that. Sita's urgings had been unnecessary, for even had she wished him to speak of the past it is unlikely that she could, under any circumstances, have persuaded him to do so. As it was, she imagined that he had forgotten it, and was grateful for the shortness of a child's memory.
    Her chief anxiety now was the quest for some peaceful backwater, sufficiently remote from the bustling cities and the highroads of Hind to remain ignorant of such matters as the rise or fall of the Company. A place small enough to escape the eyes of those who would now be in authority, yet large enough to absorb a woman and a child without their arrival attracting attention or arousing curiosity. Somewhere where she could find work and they could settle down and begin life again, and find peace and contentment and freedom from fear. Her own home village did not fall into this category, because there she would be known and her return lead to endless speculation and questioning by her own and her husband's family; and inevitably, the truth would leak out. For the boy's sake she could not risk that: and for her own also. She could hardly conceal Daya Ram's death from his parents, and once that was known, she would be forced to conduct herself as a widow, a childless widow, should; and there were few worse fates in India, for such women were considered to be responsible for their husbands' death, it being believed that some misconduct in a previous life had brought misfortune on their men.
    A widow must never wear colours or jewellery, but shave her head and dress only in white. She could not marry again, but must end her days as an unpaid drudge in her husband's family, despised on account of her sex and resented as the bringer of bad luck. It was not surprising that in the days before the law of the Company had