ver seen him clean
them muchly-fish with 'is thumbs"?'

'Anyhow,' said Revere three weeks later, 'he's doing his best to keep
his things clean.'

When the spring died, Bobby joined in the general scramble for Hill
leave, and to his surprise and delight secured three months.

'As good a boy as I want,' said Revere the admiring skipper.

'The best of the batch,' said the Adjutant to the Colonel. 'Keep back
that young skrim-shanker Porkiss, sir, and let Revere make him sit up.'

So Bobby departed joyously to Simla Pahar with a tin box of gorgeous
raiment.

'Son of Wick old Wick of Chota-Buldana? Ask him to dinner, dear,' said
the aged men.

'What a nice boy!' said the matrons and the maids.

'First-class place, Simla. Oh, ripping!' said Bobby Wick, and ordered
new white cord breeches on the strength of it.

'We're in a bad way,' wrote Revere to Bobby at the end of two months.
'Since you left, the Regiment has taken to fever and is fairly rotten
with it two hundred in hospital, about a hundred in cells drinking to
keep off fever and the Companies on parade fifteen file strong at the
outside. There's rather more sickness in the out-villages than I care
for, but then I'm so blistered with prickly-heat that I'm ready to hang
myself. What's the yarn about your mashing a Miss Haverley up there? Not
serious, I hope? You're over-young to hang millstones round your neck,
and the Colonel will turf you out of that in double-quick time if you
attempt it.'

It was not the Colonel that brought Bobby out of Simla, but a
much-more-to-be-respected Commandant. The sickness in the out-villages
spread, the Bazar was put out of bounds, and then came the news that
the Tail Twisters must go into camp. The message flashed to the Hill
stations. 'Cholera Leave stopped Officers recalled.' Alas for the
white gloves in the neatly-soldered boxes, the rides and the dances and
picnics that were to be, the loves half spoken, and the debts unpaid!
Without demur and without question, fast as tonga could fly or pony
gallop, back to their Regiments and their Batteries, as though they were
hastening to their weddings, fled the subalterns.

Bobby received his orders on returning from a dance at Viceregal Lodge
where he had But only the Haverley girl knows what Bobby had said, or
how many waltzes he had claimed for the next ball. Six in the morning
saw Bobby at the Tonga Office in the drenching rain, the whirl of the
last waltz still in his ears, a