ghbour.

"That match is a certainty, Mrs Mayhew. Say what you like. I'm sure of
it. I only wonder it hasn't been given out before now."

Mrs Mayhew shifted her parasol and inspected the retreating pair through
her gold-rimmed pince-nez, as though, by examining their shoulder-blades,
she could determine the exact state of their hearts.

"I don't quite know _what_ to think," she remarked with judicial
emphasis. "I don't believe anything is a certainty where Major Garth is
concerned. But if they are not engaged they _ought_ to be! I don't like
that girl, though. She is much too independent for my taste; and
engagement or no, she probably lets Major Garth make love to her. He
would never have stuck to her for six months otherwise."

On the last words Lenox started as it a cold finger-tip had touched his
heart. Such a thought had never occurred to him: and he could have
murdered, without compunction, the small self-satisfied woman who had
lodged the poisoned shaft in his mind.

Turning on his heel, he made straight for his tent, where a littered
camp-table gave proof that the art of taking a holiday could not be
reckoned among his accomplishments. Then he sat down by it and bowed his
head upon his hands. To doubt his wife's integrity was rank insult. Yet
he knew Garth's evil reputation; knew also that the suggestion would
cling to his memory like a limpet, and torture him in the endless hours
of wakefulness from which there was now no way of escape.

Enforced abstinence from tobacco and stimulants had told severely upon
his nerves, appetite, and health; and a foretaste of the sleepless night
ahead of him tempted him to regret his hasty destruction of the bottle of
chlorodyne, which had not been replaced.

Till dusk he worked without intermission; and, as if by a fiendish nicety
of calculation, the evening mail-bag,--brought out by runner from
Dalhousie,--contained the coveted parcel of tobacco, whose arrival he had
alternately craved and dreaded throughout the past ten days.

Zyarulla set it before him with manifest satisfaction.

"Now will my Sahib taste comfort and peace again," he muttered into the
depths of his beard, and having cut the strings of the parcel, discreetly
withdrew.

For a while Lenox merely grasped his recovered treasure, feasting his
soul upon the knowledge that here, within the space of one small cube,
lay the promise of sleep, peace of mind, oblivion. Then, with unsteady
hands, h