Page:An American Girl in India.djvu/218

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208
AN AMERICAN GIRL IN INDIA

has she done it? Simply by tact and the cultivation of a smile. She has never offended anybody, and she has used her smiles so well and wisely upon those in authority that she has had half a dozen of them at her feet at once. The present Chief Secretary is her devoted admirer, and would do anything she wants, while all the ambitious younger men in the service crowd round her like a swarm of flies. They say she has made up her mind to be Lady Croydon and L.-G.'s wife, and I should not be surprised if she did it. She is the most deadly rival I've got.'

Berengaria's sigh of commiseration was lost in the clanging of the bell that heralded the approach of the L.-G.'s train. At least, I called it the clanging of the bell from force of habit, but they don't have bells in India as far as I have seen. They use a piece of iron rail hung up with a little bit of string which a coolie strikes in a manner to deafen everything with ears within reach of it.

Berengaria and I discovered our names on the door of our compartment without much difficulty. But, alas! the other two occupants had been before us, and, of course, they had taken the lower berths. The carriage looked absolutely full already, with any number of trunks and boxes, and lots of clothes and sundries hanging up on pegs beside the two well-tucked-up sleeping forms on the lower berths. At least, they were not sleeping forms any longer from the moment we tried to get in. How they must have anathematised us. One of them had to get up to drag a huge dressing-case away from