and her brother seldom
mentioned him in his letters; for during Parker's absence on two months'
privilege leave from Ranga Duar Dermot did not quit it often and very
rarely visited the planters' club or the bungalows of any of its members.
And Noreen wanted news of him. Much as she saw of other men now--many of
them attractive and some of whom she frankly liked--none had effaced
Dermot's image or displaced him from the shrine that she had built for him
in her inmost heart. Mingled with her love was hero-worship. She dared
not hope that he could ever be interested in or care for any one as
shallow-minded as she. She could not picture him descending from the
pedestal on which she had placed him to raise so ordinary a girl to his
heart. She could not fancy him in the light, frothy life of Darjeeling.
She judged him too serious to care for frivolities, and it inspired her
with a little awe of him and a fear that he would despise her as a
feather-brained, silly woman if he saw how she enjoyed the amusements
of the hill-station. But she felt that she would gladly exchange the
gaieties and cool climate of Darjeeling for the torments of the Terai
again, if only it would bring him to her side. For sometimes the longing
to see him grew almost unbearable.

As the days went by the power of the gay life of the Hills to satisfy her
grew less, while the ache in her heart for her absent friend increased. If
only she could hear from him she thought she could bear the separation
better. From her brother she learned by chance that he was alone in Ranga
Duar, the only news that she had had of him for a long time. The Rains had
burst, and she pictured the loneliness of the one European in the solitary
outpost, cut off from his kind, with no one of his race to speak to,
deprived of the most ordinary requirements, necessities, of civilisation,
without a doctor within hundreds of miles.

At that thought her heart seemed to stop beating. Without a doctor! He
might be ill, dying, for all she knew, with no one of his colour to tend
him, no loving hand to hold a cup to his fevered lips. Even in the short
time that she had been in India she had heard of many tragedies of
isolation, of sick and lonely Englishmen with none but ignorant, careless
native servants to look after them in their illness, no doctor to alleviate
their sufferings, until pain and delirium drove them to look for relief and
oblivion down the barrel of a too-ready pistol.

Thus