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 the girl tortured herself, as a loving woman will do, by imagining all the most terrible things happening to the man of her heart.  She feared no longer the perils of the forest for him.  She felt that he was master of man or beast in it.  But fever lays low the strongest.  It might be that while she was dancing he was lying ill, dying, perhaps dead.  And she would not know.  The dreadful idea occurred to her after her return from a ball at which she had been universally admired and much sought after.  But, as she sat wrapped in her blue silk dressing-gown, her feet thrust into satin slippers of the same colour, her pretty hair about her shoulders, instead of recalling the triumphs of the evening, the compliments of her partners, and the unspoken envy of other girls, her thoughts flew to one solitary man in a little bungalow, cloud-enfolded and comfortless, in a lonely outpost.  The sudden dread of his being ill chilled her blood and so terrified her that, if the hour had not made it impossible, she would have gone out at once and telegraphed to him to ask if all were well.