on the breast with the Imperial monogram in gold, came out and held a small silver tray to him.  Wargrave placed a couple of his visiting cards on it, and the gorgeous apparition (known as a chuprassi) retired into the building with them.  While he was gone Wargrave looked with pleasure at the brilliant flower-beds, green lawn and tall plants and bushes glowing with colour of the carefully-tended and well-watered Residency garden, which contrasted strikingly with the dry, bare compounds of the cantonment.

In a minute or two the chuprassi returned and said: 

“Salaam!”

Wargrave, hooking up the reins, climbed down from the trap, leaving Raymond’s syce in charge of the pony, and entered the grateful coolness of the lofty hall.  Here another chuprassi took his hat and, holding out a pen for him, indicated the red-bound Visitor’s Book, in which he was to inscribe his name.  Then one of the servants led the way up the broad staircase into a large and well-furnished drawing-room extending along the whole front of the building.  Here Wargrave found Mrs. Norton awaiting him.  She looked very lovely in a cool white dress of muslin—­but muslin shaped by a master-hand of Paris.  She welcomed him gaily and made him feel at once on the footing of an old friend.

She was genuinely glad to see him again.  To this young and attractive woman, full of the joy of living, hardly more than a girl, yet married to a much older man, sober-minded, stolid and uncongenial to her, and buried in this dull and lonely station, Wargrave had appealed instantly.  Youth calls to youth, and she hailed his advent into her monotonous life as a child greets the coming of a playfellow.  With the other two ladies in Rohar she had nothing in common.  Both were middle-aged, serious and spiteful.  To them her youth and beauty were an offence; and from the first day of their acquaintance with her they had disliked her.  As for the other officers of the regiment none of them attracted her; for, good fellows as they were, none shared any of her tastes except her love of sport.  But in Wargrave she had already recognised a companion, a playmate, one to whom music, art and poetry appealed as they did to her.

On his side Frank, heart-whole but fond of the society of the opposite sex, was at once attracted by this charming member of it who had tastes akin to his own.  Her beauty pleased his beauty-loving eye; and he would not have been man if her readiness to meet him on a footing of friendship had not flattered him.  He had thought that a great drawback to life in Rohar would be the lack of feminine companionship; for the ladies of his regiment were not at all congenial, although he did not dislike them.  But it was delightful to find in this desert spot this pretty and cultured woman, who would have been deemed attractive in London and who appeared trebly so in a dull and lonely Indian station.  He had thought much of her since their