After his ablutions Wargrave lay down on his bed and slept for an hour or two until awakened by Raymond’s voice bidding him join him at tea.  Strolling in pyjamas and slippers into the sitting-room which they shared the subaltern found his comrade lying lazily in a long chair and attired in the same cool costume.  The outer doors and windows of the bungalow were still closed against the brooding heat outside.  Inside the house the temperature was little cooler despite the punkah which droned monotonously overhead.

Over their tea the two young soldiers discussed the day’s sport, recalling every incident of each run and kill, until the servants came in to throw open the doors and windows in hope of a faint breath of evening coolness.  The punkah stopped, and the coolie who pulled it shuffled away.

After tea Raymond took his companion to inspect the cantonment, which Wargrave had not yet seen, for he had not reached it until after dusk the previous day.  It consisted only of the Mess, the Regimental Office, and about ten bungalows for the officers, single-storied brick or rubble-walled buildings, thatched or tiled.  Some of them were unoccupied and were tumbling in ruins.  There was nothing else—­not even the “general shop” usual in most small cantonments.  Not a spool of thread, not a tin of sardines, could be purchased within a three days’ journey.  Most of the food supplies and almost everything else had to be brought from Bombay.  Around the bungalow the compounds were simply patches of the universal sands surrounded by mud walls.  No flowers, no trees, not even a blade of grass, relieved the dull monotony.  Altogether the cantonment of Rohar was an unlovely and uninteresting place.  Yet it is but an example of many such stations in India, lonely and soul-deadening, some of which have not even its saving grace of sport to enliven existence in them.

After a visit to the Lines—­the rows of single-storied detached brick buildings, one to a company, that housed the native ranks of the regiment—­where the Indian officers and sepoys (as native infantry soldiers are called) rushed out to crowd round and welcome back their popular officer, Wargrave and Raymond strolled to the Mess.  Here in the anteroom other British officers of the corps, tired out after the day’s sport, were lying in easy chairs, reading the three days’ old Bombay newspaper just arrived and the three weeks’ old English journals until it was time to return to their bungalows and dress for dinner.

Early on the following afternoon Wargrave borrowed Raymond’s bamboo cart and pony—­for he had sold his own trap and horses before going on leave to England and had not yet had time to buy new ones—­and drove to the Residency.  When he pulled up before the hall-door and in Anglo-Indian fashion shouted “Boy!” from his seat in the vehicle, a tall, stately Indian servant in a long, gold-laced red coat reaching below the knees and embroidered