“Oh, yes. It’s a thing the ‘pundits’ do, when surveying. The standard Tibetan prayer-beads hold 108 beads, along with two subsidiary strings of five each. If one removes eight, the rosary appears the same, but an even hundred becomes quite useful for survey purposes: One bead for each hundred steps, ten thousand steps to a circuit; with the side-beads a man can survey a small country. Assuming the length of his steps is unchanging.”

“I see.” I tried to imagine keeping track of steps while carrying on a conversation, and maintaining perfect distance on each stride; I failed.

When Nesbit left, he took with him the débris from the enlightenment of skin and hair so as not to provide fodder for below-the-stairs gossip. As I struggled to bring my straw-like mane under control, I made a mental note to purchase some sort of oil in the town to keep the strands from snapping off entirely. A short session with the white-bearded durzi, choosing samples and lending him some of my clothes to copy, and a shorter session with the shoemaker, then I was off to town.

I reminded myself to use the front door of the Lodge, where I nodded briefly to the regal chuprassi who held it for me, and was about to take to the road when I noticed the motorcar, its driver holding its door. You’re English again, Russell, I reminded myself, and climbed inside.

Nesbit and I had sketched out a plan to bring me back into the Goodheart circle, beginning with a chance meeting at the tea shop where he had taken the family the day before. As soon as he heard of their distressing abandonment by their porters, he would extend a breakfast invitation to the family matron, who would no more leave Sunny behind than she would walk the two miles to Viceregal Lodge. And indeed, when I happened to wander through the Gothic doors of that particular tea shop across from the band-stand, Mrs Goodheart and her Flapper daughter were seated opposite the eligible young British officer, all smiling merrily over their coffee cups. The other patrons of the shop watched Sunny from the corners of their eyes, as much, I thought, for the gaiety of her person as the extremity of her wardrobe. Mrs Goodheart’s smile faded somewhat when I came to their table with my exclamations of surprise, but then she remembered that I was safely married, and invited me to join them.

“My, Mary, haven’t you gone dark!”

You don’t know the half of it, I thought, and accepted the invitation to coffee with some remark about the strength of the sun at these altitudes.

It was Sunny who asked the question. “Where is your husband this morning?”