is not
a country for idlers. Every white man in it has work to do, otherwise he
would not be in that land at all. Husbands therefore cannot always
accompany their spouses to the mountains, and, when they do, can rarely
contrive to remain there for six months or longer of the Season.
Consequently the wives are often very lonely in the big hotels that abound
on the hill-tops, and sometimes drift into dependence on bachelors on leave
for daily companionship, for escort to the many social functions, for
regular dancing partners. And so trouble is bred.

Major Dermot was no lover of these mountain Capuas of Hindustan, and had
gladly escaped from Simla, chiefest of them all. Yet now he sat in his
little stone bungalow in Ranga Duar, while the terrific thunder crashed and
roared among the hills, and read with a pleased smile an official letter
ordering him to proceed forthwith to Darjeeling--as gay a pleasure colony
as any--to meet the General Commanding the Division, who was visiting the
place on inspection duty. For the same post had brought him a letter from
Noreen Daleham which told him that she was then, and had been for some
time, in that hill-station.

The climate of the Terai, unpleasantly but not unbearably hot in the summer
months, is pestilential and deadly during the rains, when malaria and the
more dreaded black-water fever take toll of the strongest. Noreen had
suffered in health in the hot weather, and her brother was seriously
concerned at the thought of her being obliged to remain in Malpura
throughout the Monsoon. He could not take her to the Hills; it was
impossible for him to absent himself even for a few days from the garden,
for the care and management of it was devolving more and more every day on
him, owing to the intemperate habits of Parry.

Fred Daleham's relief was great when his sister unexpectedly received a
letter from a former school-friend who two years before had married a man
in the Indian Civil Service. Noreen, who was a good deal her junior, had
corresponded regularly with her, and she now wrote to say that she was
going to Darjeeling for the Season and suggested that Noreen should join
her there. Much as the prospect of seeing a friend whom she had idolised,
appealed to the girl (to say nothing of the gaieties of a hill-station and
the pleasure of seeing shops, real shops, again), she was nevertheless
unwilling to leave her brother. But Fred insisted on her going.

From Darjeeling she t