animation had vanished, and she talked with evident effort and seemed
glad of the darkness of the veranda.

Suddenly one of those strange silences fell over everyone, silences that
may be of a few seconds' duration, but that appear like hours. What they
are connected with, no one can guess. The silence lasted for a second,
and it was broken with sudden violence.

"My God," said the voice of Hartley, the Head of the Police, speaking in
tones of alarm. "Mrs. Wilder has fainted!" She had fallen forward in her
chair, and he had caught her as she fell.

Very soon the guests dispersed and the bungalow was still for the night.
One or two waited to hear what the doctor had to say, and went away
satisfied in the knowledge that the heat had been too much for Mrs.
Wilder, and, but for that event, the dinner-party would have been
forgotten after two days. Hartley was the last to leave, and the sound
of trotting hoofs grew faint along the road.

By an hour after midnight nearly the whole white population can be
presumed to be asleep; day wakes early in the East, and there are few
who keep all-night hours, because morning calls men from their beds to
their work, and even this hot, sultry night people lay on their beds and
tried to sleep; but in the small bungalow where the Rev. Francis Heath
lived with a solitary Sapper officer, the bed that he slept in was
smooth and unstirred by restless tossing inside the mosquito net.

The Rev. Francis was out, sitting by the bed of a dying parishioner. He
watched the long hours through, dressed as he had been in the afternoon,
in a grey flannel suit, his thin neck too long and too spare for his
all-around collar, and as he watched sometimes and sometimes prayed, he
too felt the pressure of the night.

The woman he prayed beside was dying and quite unconscious of his
presence. Now and then, to relieve the strain, he got up and stood by
the window, looking at the lights against the sky and thinking very
definitely of something that troubled him and drew his lips into a
tight, thin line. He was a young man of the type described usually as
"zealous" and "earnest," and a light that was almost the light of
fanaticism shone in his eyes. A dying parishioner was no more of a
novelty to Mr. Heath, than one of Mrs. Wilder's dinner-parties was to
her guests, and yet the woman on the bed appealed to his pity as few
others had done in his experience.

When the doctor came he nodded to the clergyman and