Tommy soon decided to leave early and return to his letters.  Before departing, he looked round for Monck as was his custom, but finding that he and Captain Ermsted had also been drawn into the discussion with the Colonel, he left the mess alone.

Back in The Green Bungalow he flung off his coat and threw himself down in his shirt-sleeves on the verandah to read his sister’s letter.  The light from the red-shaded lamp streamed across the pages.  Stella had written very fully of their wanderings, but her companion she scarcely mentioned.

It was like a gorgeous dream, she said.  Each day seemed to bring greater beauties.  They had spent the first two at Agra to see the wonderful Taj which of course was wholly beyond description.  Thence they had made their way to Rawal Pindi where Ralph had several military friends to be introduced to his bride.  It was evident that he was anxious to display his new possession, and Tommy frowned a little over that episode, realizing fully why Stella touched so lightly upon it.  For some reason his dislike of Dacre was increasing rapidly, and he read the letter very critically.  It was the first with any detail that she had written.  From Rawal Pindi they had journeyed on to exquisite Murree set in the midst of the pines where only to breathe was the keenest pleasure.  Stella spoke almost wistfully of this place; she would have loved to linger there.

“I could be happy there in perfect solitude,” she wrote, “with just Peter the Great to take care of me.”  She mentioned the Sikh bearer more than once and each time with growing affection.  “He is like an immense and kindly watch-dog,” she said in one place.  “Every material comfort that I could possibly wish for he manages somehow to procure, and he is always on guard, always there when wanted, yet never in the way.”

Their time being limited and Ralph anxious to use it to the utmost, they had left Murree after a very brief stay and pressed on into Kashmir, travelling in a tonga through the most glorious scenery that Stella had ever beheld.

“I only wished you could have been there to enjoy it with me,” she wrote, and passed on to a glowing description of the Hills amidst which they had travelled, all grandly beautiful and many capped with the eternal snows.  She told of the River Jhelum, swift and splendid, that flowed beside the way, of the flowers that bloomed in dazzling profusion on every side—­wild roses such as she had never dreamed of, purple acacias, jessamine yellow and white, maiden-hair ferns that hung in sprays of living green over the rushing waterfalls, and the vivid, scarlet pomegranate blossom that grew like a spreading fire.

And the air that blew through the mountains was as the very breath of life.  Physically, she declared, she had never felt so well; but she did not speak of happiness, and again Tommy’s brow contracted as he read.

For all its enthusiasm, there was to him something wanting in that letter—­a lack that hurt him subtly.  Why did she say so little of her companion in the wilderness?  No casual reader would have dreamed that the narrative had been written by a bride upon her honeymoon.