The Major replied that the boy was physically rather remarkably strong, mentally very sound, and in character all that could be desired.  He then did his best to convey to the General an understanding of the psychic condition that must be a cause of watchfulness and anxiety on the part of those who guarded his adolescence.

At dinner, over the General’s wonderful Clos Vougeot, the Major again returned to the subject and felt that his words of advice fell upon somewhat indifferent and uncomprehending ears.

It was the General’s boast that he had never feed a doctor in his life, and his impression that a sound resort for any kind of invalid is a lethal chamber....

The seven years since the Major had last seen her, seemed to have dealt lightly with the sad-faced, pretty Miss Yvette, gentle, good, and very kind.  Over the boy she rhapsodized to her own content and his embarrassment.  Effusive endearments and embraces were new to Dam, and he appeared extraordinarily ignorant of the art of kissing.

“Oh, how like his dear Father!” she would exclaim afresh every few minutes, to the Major’s slight annoyance and the General’s plain disgust.

“Every inch a Stukeley!” he would growl in reply.

But Yvette Seymour Stukeley had prayed for Colonel de Warrenne nightly for seven years and had idealized him beyond recognition.  Possibly Fate’s greatest kindness to her was to ordain that she should not see him as he had become in fact, and compare him with her wondrous mental image....  The boy was to her, must be, should be, the very image of her life’s hero and beloved....

The depolarized and bewildered Damocles found himself in a strange and truly foreign land, a queer, cold, dismal country inhabited by vast quantities of “second-class sahibs,” as he termed the British lower middle-class and poor, a country of a strange greenness and orderedness, where there were white servants, strangely conjoined rows of houses in the villages, dangerous-looking fires inside the houses, a kind of tomb-stones on all house-tops, strange horse-drawn vehicles, butlerless and ghari[9]-less sahibs, and an utter absence of “natives,” sepoys, byle-gharies,[10] camels, monkeys, kites, squirrels, bulbuls, minahs,[11] mongooses, palm-trees, and temples.  Cattle appeared to have no humps, crows to have black heads, and trees to have no fruit.  The very monsoon seemed inextricably mixed with the cold season.  Fancy the rains coming in the cold weather!  Perhaps there was no hot weather and nobody went to the hills in this strange country of strange people, strange food, strange customs.  Nobody seemed to have any tents when they left the station for the districts, nor to take any bedding when they went on tour or up-country.  A queer, foreign land.

But Monksmead was a most magnificent “bungalow” standing in a truly beautiful “compound”—­wherein the very bhistis[12] and mallis were European and appeared to be second-class sahibs.