d little liking for her own sex. And then, he
told himself, these two would probably refuse to know a woman who had
run away from her husband to another man. When he had turned out the
light and jumped into bed he lay awake a long time puzzling over the
tangle into which the threads of her life and his seemed to have got.
Time alone could unravel it.

He tossed uneasily on his bed, unable to sleep, and presently a slight
noise on the verandah outside caught his ear. He lay still and listened;
and it seemed to him that soft footfalls of a large animal's pads
sounded on the wooden flooring. Then suddenly he heard a beast sniffing
at his closed door. "A stray dog," he thought. But suddenly he
remembered Burke's account of the panther that haunted the Mess; and a
thrill of excitement ran through him and drove all his unhappy thoughts
away. He sprang out of bed and rushed across the room to get his rifle,
but in the darkness overturned a chair which fell with a crash to the
ground. This scared the animal; for there was a sudden scurry outside,
and by the time Wargrave had found the rifle and groped for a couple of
cartridges there was nothing to be seen on the verandah when he threw
open the door. It was a brilliant star-lit night. Burke called to him
from his room and when Wargrave went to him said that he too had heard
the animal, which was undoubtedly the panther.

Returning to bed Frank was dropping off to sleep half an hour later when
he was startled by a shrill, agonised shriek coming from a distance.
Rifle in hand he rushed out on to the verandah again and heard faint
shouts coming from a small group of Bhuttia huts on a shoulder of the
hills hundreds of feet above the Mess. He called out but got no answer;
and after listening for some time and hearing nothing further he
returned to bed and at last fell asleep. In the morning he learned that
the panther had made a daring raid on a hut and carried off a Bhuttia
wood-cutter's baby from its sleeping mother's side, and had devoured it
in the jungle not two hundred yards away.

The Durbar, or official ceremony of the public reception of the Bhutan
Envoy and the paying over to him of the annual subsidy of a hundred
thousand rupees, was held in a marquee on the parade ground in the
afternoon. There was a Guard of Honour of a hundred sepoys to salute,
first the Political Officer and afterwards the _Deb Zimpun_ when he
arrived on a mule at the head of his swordsmen and cooli