r some long time, at least with his old corps.

The Colonel had refused to agree to his being invited formally to be the
guest of the regiment; and neither he nor the other married man, the
Doctor, were present. If they slept that night they were the only two
officers in the Cantonment that did; for none of the others, not even
senior major, Hepburn, left the Mess until it was time to escort their
departing comrade to his bungalow to change for the journey. And, as the
_tonga_-ponies rattled down the road and bore him away, Frank's last
sight of his old comrades was the group of white-clad figures in the
dawn waving frantically and cheering vociferously from the gateway of
his bungalow.

The memory of it rejoiced him throughout the terrible hours of the long
journey in the baking heat and blinding glare of the Hot Weather day.
The worse moments were the stops every ten miles to change ponies, when
he had to wait in the blazing sunshine. His "boy," who sat on the front
seat of the vehicle beside the driver, produced from a basket packed
with wet straw cooled bottles of soda-water, without which Wargrave felt
that he would have died of sunstroke.

Then on after each halt; and the endless strip of white road again
unrolled before him, while the never-ceasing clank of the iron-shod bar
coupling the ponies maddened his aching head with its monotonous rhythm.

As the weary miles slid past him his thoughts were with Violet, so
beautiful, so patient and brave in her self-denying endurance. And he
cursed himself for having added to her pain, and inwardly vowed that
some day he would atone to her for it.

At last the _tonga_ rattled into the bare compound of the Basedi
dak-bungalow standing on a high stone plinth. The untidy
_khansamah_--the custodian of the rest-home--hurried on to the verandah
to greet the unexpected visitor and show his "boy" where to put the
sahib's bedding and baggage in a bleak room with a cane-bottomed wooden
bed hung with torn mosquito-curtains.

From a glass case in the sitting-room containing a scanty store of
canned provisions the _khansamah_ provided a meal with such ill-assorted
ingredients as Somebody's desiccated soup lukewarm, a tin of sardines
and sweet biscuits to eat with them, and a bottle of beer to wash it
down with. Wargrave was too choked with dust, too sickened with the heat
and glare, to have any appetite. After a smoke he dragged his weary body
to bed and in spite of the mosquitoe