he starry heavens. Behind him, the lamp-lit
rooms sent long thrusts of light, sword-wise, into the hot darkness.
Joan Malcolm had taken up her violin, and the sweet, wailing notes of it
came sighing out on to the heavy air. Ruddy, broad-faced young Capper,
of the Police, lounged by the open window, eating her up with adoring
eyes.

His Honor smoked his cigar tranquilly, but at heart, he smouldered.
Harrow and Lincoln's Inn backed his past, the High Courts awaited him in
the future. For the present he was a Civil Servant of excellent position
and recognized ability, a Mohammedan gentleman who had distinguished
himself in England as well as in the land of his birth. Also, he was of
less account in the eyes of Joan Malcolm than Capper, a blundering
English Acting-Superintendent of Police, with a pittance of six hundred
rupees per mensem.

Possibly Capper had not intended to be offensive, but it is not given to
the young and the British to entirely conceal all consciousness of
superiority when speaking with a native. His courtesy was that of a man
who considered it to be beneath his dignity to use less ceremony. His
civility was due to his respect for himself, not for the person whom he
honored with his unintellectual conversation.

The Judge flipped the ash off his cigar, and his slender hand was cool
and leisurely. His dark, straight-featured face was impassive as carven
stone. Mentally, he was cursing Capper with curses of inexhaustible fire
and venom.

Malcolm, the Collector, had a right to speak loudly, and to say this or
that without cause, for he was Collector; but Capper, a mere
Superintendent of the Police, a cub of twenty-three, was on a very
different footing. Yet, not even as an equal had he borne himself toward
a District Judge.

His Honor's bungalow was on the outskirts of the town, and as he paced
along the dusty road, he came to a footpath that ran down the hill,
through dense jungle, to the native village in the valley. There was a
swarm of dark-skinned fellow-men down there, to whom his name stood for
all that is highest in authority. They would have loaded him with gifts
had he permitted them to approach him. To them, it seemed that he was
placed far above as a god, holding their lives and their fate 'twixt
finger and thumb, in mid-air. In the unfathomed depths of the Judge's
educated, well-ordered mind stirred a craving for solace. Galled by the
brutish indifference of the Englishmen, there was yet