otion, was like an interminable presence, irritating,
poisonous. The punkah, too, flapped incessant, and only made the lamp
gutter. Broad leaves outside shone in mockery of snow; and like snow the
stifled river lay in the moonlight, where the wet muzzles of buffaloes
glistened, floating like knots on sunken logs, or the snouts of
crocodiles. Birds fluttered, sleepless and wretched. Coolies, flung
asleep on the burnt grass, might have been corpses, but for the sound of
their troubled breathing.

"If I could believe," he groaned, sitting with hands thrust through his
hair. "If I believe in her--But I came too late."

The lamp was an added torment. He sprang up from it, wiped the drops off
his forehead, and paced again. He came too late. All alone. The collar
of his tunic strangled him. He stuffed his fingers underneath, and
wrenched; then as he came and went, catching sight in a mirror, was
shocked to see that, in Biblical fashion, he had rent his garments.

"This is bad," he thought, staring. "It is the heat. I must not stay
alone."

He shouted, clapped his hands for a servant, and at last, snatching a
coat from his unruffled boy, hurried away through stillness and
moonlight to the detested club. On the stairs a song greeted him,--a
fragment with more breath than melody, in a raw bass:--

"Jolly boating weather,
And a hay harvest breeze!"

"Shut up!" snarled another voice. "Good God, man!"

The loft was like a cave heated by subterranean fires. Two long punkahs
flapped languidly in the darkness, with a whine of pulleys. Under a
swinging lamp, in a pool of light and heat, four men sat playing cards,
their tousled heads, bare arms, and cinglets torn open across the chest,
giving them the air of desperadoes.

"Jolly boating weather," wheezed the fat Sturgeon. He stood apart in
shadow, swaying on his feet. "What would you give," he propounded
thickly, "for a hay harvest breeze?"

He climbed, or rolled, upon the billiard-table, turned head toward
punkah, and suddenly lay still,--a gross white figure, collapsed and
sprawling.

"How much does he think a man can stand?" snapped Nesbit, his lean
Cockney face pulled in savage lines. "Beast of a song! He'll die
to-night, drinking."

"Die yourself," mumbled the singer, "'m goin' sleep. More 'n you can
do."

A groan from the players, and the vicious flip of a card, acknowledged
the hit. Rudolph joined them, ungreeting and ungreeted. The game went on
grimly, with