al half-dozen chairs that did
not match, picked up at sales of dead men's effects; and the usual
streaks of black grease where the leather punka-thong ran through the
wall. It was as though everything had been unpacked the night before
to be repacked next morning. Not a door in the house was true on its
hinges. The little windows, fifteen feet up, were darkened with
wasp-nests, and lizards hunted flies between the beams of the
wood-ceiled roof. But all this was part of Scott's life. Thus did
people live who had such an income; and in a land where each man's
pay, age, and position are printed in a book, that all may read, it
is hardly worth while to play at pretences in word or deed. Scott
counted eight years' service in the Irrigation Department, and drew
eight hundred rupees a month, on the understanding that if he served
the State faithfully for another twenty-two years he could retire on
a pension of some four hundred rupees a month. His working life,
which had been spent chiefly under canvas or in temporary shelters
where a man could sleep, eat, and write letters, was bound up with
the opening and guarding of irrigation canals, the handling of two or
three thousand workmen of all castes and creeds, and the payment of
vast sums of coined silver. He had finished that spring, not without
credit, the last section of the great Mosuhl Canal, and--much against
his will, for he hated office work--had been sent in to serve during
the hot weather on the accounts and supply side of the Department,
with sole charge of the sweltering sub-office at the capital of the
Province. Martyn knew this; William, his sister, knew it; and
everybody knew it.

Scott knew, too, as well as the rest of the world, that Miss Martyn
had come out to India four years before, to keep house for her
brother, who, as everyone, again, knew, had borrowed the money to pay
for her passage, and that she ought, as all the world said, to have
married long ago. Instead of this, she had refused some half a dozen
subalterns, a civilian twenty years her senior, one major, and a man
in the Indian Medical Department. This, too, was common property. She
had 'stayed down three hot weathers,' as the saying is, because her
brother was in debt and could not afford the expense of her keep at
even a cheap hill-station. Therefore her face was white as bone, and
in the centre of her forehead was a big silvery scar about the size
of a shilling--the mark of a Delhi sore, which