There was a trace--just the shadow of a suggestion--of anxiety on his dignified face under the snow-white turban.

He presented him with a note on a salver with a few murmured words and a deep salaam.
"For the _sahib's_ hands alone," he said.
Merryon snatched up the note and opened it with shaking hands.
It was very brief, pathetically so, and as he read a great emptiness seemed to spread and spread around him in an ever-widening desolation.
"Good-bye, my Billikins!" Ah, the pitiful, childish scrawl she had made of it! "I've come to my senses, and I've gone back to him.

I'm not worthy of any sacrifice of yours, dear.

And it would have been a big sacrifice.

You wouldn't like being dragged through the mud, but I'm used to it.