“Oh, I find it amusing.  You forget, we women have a better time in India than in Europe.  There are too many of us there, so you don’t value us.”

“Better time.  Oh, Law!  What rot!” He laughed rudely.  “You’ve never lived yet, dear.  Look here, Vi.  My father’s one of the three richest men in South Africa; and all he’s got will come to me some day.  As it is he gives me an allowance bigger than those of all the other men in the regiment put together.  I hate the Service and its idiotic discipline.  I want to be free—­to go where money counts.  Damn India!”

“Doesn’t it count everywhere?” she asked, fanning herself lazily.  His rough, almost boorish, manner amused her always.  She felt as if she were playing with a caged tiger.  “Doesn’t it here?”

“No; in the Army they seem to think more of some damned pauper who comes of a ‘county family,’ as they call it, than of a fellow like me who could buy up a dozen of them.  I hate them all.  And I mean to chuck it.  But I want you to come with me, Vi.  And, what’s more, I mean to have you.”

“But your father wishes you to stay in the Service.  You told me so yourself.  Will he like it if you leave—­and will he continue your allowance?”

“Oh, I’ll get round him.  He’s only got me.  He’s no one else to leave his money to.  It’d be all right, Vi.  Answer me.  I mean to get you.”

He grasped her wrist and tried to drag her towards him.  She laughed and held him off.

“Take care, my dear boy.  Darkness has ears.  We’re not alone in the garden, please remember.  If you can’t behave prettily I’m going back to the ballroom.  Come, there’s the music beginning again.”

He tried to seize her in his arms, but she eluded his grasp with a dexterity that argued practice, and, rising, moved across the grass.  He followed sulkily, dominated by her cool and careless indifference.  When they reached the verandah one of the Government House aides-de-camp rushed up to her.

“Oh, Mrs. Norton, I’ve been hunting for you everywhere.  I’ve a message from His Excellency.  He wants you to come to his table at supper and save him from the Members of Council’s awful wives.”

“Oh, thanks, Captain Gardner, I’ll come with pleasure,” she answered, smiling prettily on him.  An A.D.C. is always worth cultivating.

“I say, is it hopeless asking you for a dance now?” he said.  “We poor devils of the Staff don’t get a chance at the beginning of the evening, as we’re so busy introducing people to Their Excellencies.”

She looked at her programme.

“You can have this, if you like.  It’s only with some Indian Civilian in spectacles; and I hate the Heaven Born.  They’re such bores.”  She smiled and sailed off on the A.D.C.’s arm to the disgust of Rosenthal, calmly abandoned.  But he could not help being amused when a round-faced young man dressed as an ancient Greek with gig-lamp spectacles rushed up to overtake Mrs. Norton before she entered the ballroom, and stopped in dismay to gaze after her open-mouthed and peer at his programme.