English. There shall not be even one thing in it that isn’t quite English, not one that hasn’t come from home.”

“Right-o!” Bruce consented. “We’ll forgive you, so long as you ask us to tea every day and tiffin on Sundays, and dinner very often. And you and I will sit on the veranda under the punkah, and eat mango-ices and chilled pumelos, while Crespin and Crossland dig your garden and swear at each other.”

“I shall not have a punkah,” Mrs. Crespin said severely. “I shall have nothing, I tell you, that we do not have at home. Our home is going to be an English home.”

“You’ll have a punkah, dear,” said Crespin softly. “You’ll have several.”

“My hat, you will!” Bruce exclaimed. “And you’ll have a few other things that are not strictly English—what. White ants in the sugar, silver-fish and lizards—single spies and whole battalions of them—on your walls and out for a ride on the train of your dinner-gown, and centipedes, and cheetahs grinning in at the windows, jackals serenading you every night, and goat to eat, I repeat, which will not taste like infant Southdown, and native servants. You may like the native servants, and you may not. It’s a matter of taste.”

But Lucilla only laughed. “I’m not afraid, Captain Bruce,” she said. “You can’t frighten me.”

Crossland said nothing, but he studied the waves gravely as they foamed and beat at each other in ocean play, and his eyes were cloudy. So another English woman was coming to India to live in it apart from its peoples and beauties and wisdoms—to hold her skirts aside from India. He thought it a pity. He’d seen it so often—and he believed it the most dangerous of the several rocks upon which the ship of Empire might some day split and go down.