The Karma of Love (Bantam Series No. 14) by Barbara Cartland

it is none of your business, but I suppose that in your usual manner you are interfering in other people’s affairs.”
    She drew in her breath before she went on:
    “I have heard about you, Major Meredith. I know how you involve yourself in matters which do not concern you, and how you snoop around trying to make trouble.”
    She saw the surprise in his face at the ma nn er in which she was speaking, but now she did not care.
    “And having discovered something wrong,” she continued in a scathing tone but all the more violent because she kept it low, “you harass the person, making their lives a misery until, like poor Gerald Dewar, they shoot themselves!”
    “What are you saying? How do you know this?” Major Meredith asked and there was no disguising the astonishment in his tone.
    “I know that I despise and hate you!” Orissa cried. “I have tried to keep out of your way after the manner in which you insulted me the other night, but it seems you are determined to interfere in my private life. Leave me alone, Major Meredith! All I ask is that you leave me alone!”
    She turned as she spoke and walked away, not running frantically as she had done the last time they had been on deck together, but with her head held high.
    She was however shaking with shock and anger and only when she had passed through the door which led into the accommodation did she run to the sanctuary of her own cabin.
    She shut the door and with her cheeks burning and her breath coming jerkily from sheer rage, she walked across the cabin to stand staring at herself in the mirror on the dressing-table.
    She could see the whiteness of her neck and arms against the red of her evening gown.
    It was the same dress she had worn, she remembered, the first time she had seen Major Meredith when she had been creeping up the stairs to Charles’s room.
    Perhaps it was unlucky. Perhaps there was something about the colour of it which attracted trouble.
    Then she told herself the only thing that was really unlucky was that she had come in contact with Major Meredith.
    How dare he think such things of her? How dare he?
    At the same time some logical part of her mind told her that it was not to be expected that he should think anything else.
    Always he seemed to find her in inc r iminating circumstances: the memory of her coming down the stairs of a gentleman’s lodging at six o’clock in the morning would obviously be enough to make him sure that Mr. Mahla had been holding her hand romantically in the star-light!
    As she thought about it she realised that as he had walked up the deck towards them they would have been silhouetted against the sky and there was no denying that the Indian had in fact been touching her fingers.
    ‘But how can he think such things of me? ’ Orissa asked her reflection, and told herself in all honesty there was nothing else he could think.
    ‘It does not matter! It is of no consequence! In a few days’ time I shall never have to see him again,’ she told herself.
    Then she remembered Mr. Mahla’s words ... that it was Karma ... Fate, and there was no escaping it!
    That is nonsense!’ Orissa tried to convince herself in a practical manner. ‘We all have free-will and we all make our lives the way we want them.’
    Yet her studies of Buddhism and a picture of the Wheel of Re-birth came flooding into her mind to question such an assertion.
    Millions and millions of Orientals believed in their Fate and that there was nothing they could do about it.
    Could they all be wrong? Could the white races with their self-assurance, their conceit that they themselves were omnipotent, be the only ones who were right?
    In the meantime there was Mr. Mahla to consider. What would he think of being dismissed in such an arbitrary manner.
    She had the feeling, he would be sensible enough to understand that Major Meredith’s anger was directed not against him but against her.
    It was impossible for the Indian not to think there was something