mping for him."

"So I am to be deserted?"

"You are a man and able to look after yourself. Baby needs me far more
than you do."

Meredith refrained from any argument, feeling the futility of words in
her distraught condition. In the darkened tent he brooded over his
difficulties while his eyes strayed with jealous yearning to the slim
form in the gaudy kimono. Instead of isolation in a canvas chair, he
might so easily have shared her pillows while comforting her lovingly in
his arms! but for the time being he was out of favour and unloved!

Shortly before sunrise, Captain Dalton motored in.

CHAPTER III

THE CIVIL SURGEON

From the moment of the doctor's arrival the tension of watching was
eased; the very sight of his wide shoulders in the doorway of the tent
brought instantaneous relief to Joyce whose faith, as far as her child
was concerned, was material rather than spiritual. Though she had felt
an instinctive shrinking from the man's society on the few occasions on
which they had met, her whole heart went out to welcome him with earnest
supplication. He possessed the knowledge, under God, to save her child;
therefore, surely, was he Superman--a being apart, to be reverenced
above his fellows.

Captain Dalton of the Indian Medical Service, and Civil Surgeon of
Muktiarbad, was an unfriendly being of peculiar personality, whom no one
could comprehend. Ordinarily, he was repellent to intimacies; a reserved
autocrat, and content to be unpopular. Though elected a member of the
Club, he had little use for its privileges. Having fulfilled his duty to
his neighbours by calling on them shortly after his arrival in the
Station that summer, he had retired into professional and private life,
and was as difficult to cultivate as the Pope of Rome. He rarely
accepted invitations, and issued none. Men who called upon him received
a rigid hospitality, nothing more, so that they soon ceased to visit him
at all, at which he was relieved.

That he was a gifted musician became generally known when classical
strains from a grand piano were wafted through the Duranta hedge which
encompassed his grounds, riveting passers-by to the roadway at some
sacrifice to personal dignity, that they might listen and admire.
Sometimes he was heard to sing to his own accompaniment in a voice of
extraordinary richness and sympathy. The evening breeze would carry the
tones of his fine baritone voice farther than the Duranta hedge; and
t