his nerves were
stretched almost to breaking-point.

But Merryon went doggedly on, hewing his unswerving way through all. The
monsoon was drawing near, and the whole tortured earth seemed to be
waiting in dumb expectation.

Night after night a glassy moon came up, shining, immense and awful,
through a thick haze of heat. Night after night Merryon lay on his
veranda, smoking his pipe in stark endurance while the dreadful hours
crept by. Sometimes he held a letter from his wife hard clenched in one
powerful hand. She wrote to him frequently--short, airy epistles, wholly
inconsequent, often provocatively meagre.

"There is a Captain Silvester here," she wrote once; "such a bounder.
But he is literally the only man who can dance in the station. So what
would you? Poor Mrs. Paget is so shocked!"

Feathery hints of this description were by no means unusual, but though
Merryon sometimes frowned over them, they did not make him uneasy. His
will-o'-the-wisp might beckon, but she would never allow herself to be
caught. She never spoke of love in her letters, always ending demurely,
"Yours sincerely, Puck." But now and then there was a small cross
scratched impulsively underneath the name, and the letters that bore
this token accompanied Merryon through his inferno whithersoever he
went.

There came at last a night of terrible heat, when it seemed as if the
world itself must burst into flames. A heavy storm rolled up, roared
overhead for a space like a caged monster, and sullenly rolled away,
without a single drop of rain to ease the awful tension of waiting that
possessed all things.

Merryon left the mess early, tramping back over the dusty road,
convinced that the downpour for which they all yearned was at hand.
There was no moonlight that night, only a hot blackness, illumined now
and then by a brilliant dart of lightning that shocked the senses and
left behind a void indescribable, a darkness that could be felt. There
was something savage in the atmosphere, something primitive and
passionate that seemed to force itself upon him even against his will.
His pulses were strung to a tropical intensity that made him aware of
the man's blood in him, racing at fever heat through veins that felt
swollen to bursting.

He entered his bungalow and flung off his clothes, took a plunge in a
bath of tepid water, from which he emerged with a pricking sensation all
over him that made the lightest touch a torture, and finally, keyed u