nses, and her society too often
lends more brightness to the existence of his fellows than his own.
Children are ruinous luxuries. Bachelor life in Mess or club is too
pleasant, sport that a single man can enjoy more readily than a married one
too attractive, rupees too few for what Kipling terms "the wild ass of the
desert" to be willing to put his head into the halter readily.

Yet men do marry in India--one wonders why!--and a girl there has so many
opportunities of meeting the opposite sex every day, and so little rivalry,
that her chances in the matrimonial market are infinitely better than at
home. In stations in the Plains there are usually four or five men to every
woman in its limited society, and the proportion of bachelors to spinsters
is far greater. Sometimes in a military cantonment with five or six
batteries and regiments in it, which, with departmental officers, may
furnish a total of eighty to a hundred unmarried men from subalterns to
colonels, there may be only one or two unwedded girls. The lower ranks are
worse off for English spinster society; for the private soldier there is
none.

Noreen's two most constant attendants were Charlesworth and Melville. The
Indian Army officer's devotion and earnestness were patent to the world,
but the Rifleman's intentions were a problem and a source of dispute among
the women, who in Indian stations not less than other places watch the
progress of every love-affair with the eyes of hawks. It was doubtful if
Charlesworth himself knew what he wanted. He was a man who loved his
liberty and his right to make love to each and every woman who caught his
fancy. Noreen's casual liking for him but her frank indifference to him in
any other capacity than that of a pleasant companion with whom to ride,
dance, or play tennis, piqued him, but not sufficiently to make him risk
losing his cherished freedom.

Chunerbutty left Darjeeling after a week's stay. Parry, having become
sufficiently sober to enquire after him and learn of his absence,
demanded his instant return in a telegram so profanely worded that it
shocked even the Barwahi post-office _babu._ The engineer called on
Noreen to say good-bye, and offered to be the bearer of a message to her
brother. He kept up to the end the fable of his sick father.

He could not tell her the real reason of his coming to Darjeeling. The
truth was that he had learned that the Rajah had inspired the attempt by
the Bhuttias to carry off