rating rational thought. The morning's service
haunted him with unnatural persistence, and the half-hour he had spent
with Dick in the dead boy's bungalow, looking through his papers--a
chaos of bills, mostly unpaid; racing notes; old programmes; and half a
dozen envelopes addressed in a girl's unformed hand. On the open
blotter, an unfinished letter to a friend in Simla had announced his
hope of a speedy exchange down country! his determination not to spend
another hot weather 'on this God-forsaken Frontier . . .'

"Poor misguided chap," Lenox mused, not without a tinge of his old
contempt. "Now if only _I_ could have gone in his place, it would have
simplified matters all round."

But he thrust away the thought as morbid and cowardly; and by way of
curative drew Quita's last letter out of his breast-pocket. The fact
of her love for him still remained a miracle incompletely realised; and
she had been right in her belief that he had yet to discover its
intensity and depth.

The great noontide silence had already fallen upon house and compound.
Outside, brazen earth and brazen sky glared at one another with
malignant intensity. Two bullocks lounged under the bananas by the
mill wheel flicking lazy tails when the flies presumed too shamelessly
upon their apathy; and crows, with beaks agape, hopped resignedly from
one burning patch of shade to another. Among the verandah roof-beams,
three grey squirrels argued, with subdued chitterings, over a kipper's
head stolen from a breakfast plate; and at intervals a piteous wailing
came from the servants' quarters, where, as all knew, Nizam Din,
kitmutgar, was beating his pretty wife, Miriam Bibi, for the third time
that week, because she had grown careless in the matter of covering her
face, since the coming of Zyarulla, whose arrogant magnificence had
created a flutter in more than one respectable household.

But Quita's letter, written in her 'garden' on a boulder, before
breakfast, had transported Lenox many hundred miles away from it all.
The cluttering of squirrels, and the cries of poor Miriam Bibi entered
his ears; but the spirit of him was back among the mountains; the scent
of warm pine-needles was is his nostrils, the spell of his wife's face
and voice upon his heart.

A sudden sense of suffocation dispelled the dream. He found himself
breathless, in a bath of perspiration. The punkah had stopped dead.
And one must have endured this trifling inconvenience to