Now, relieved of the incubus that had hitherto spoiled his enjoyment of the evening, the Colonel gratefully drank the whiskey and soda brought him by Ross’s order and sat down cheerfully to play bridge.  He always liked dining in the Mess, where he was a far more important person than he was in his own house.

It did not take Wargrave long to settle down again into the routine of regimental life and the humdrum existence of a small Indian station.  But he had never before been quartered in so remote and dull a spot as Rohar.  The only distractions it offered besides the shooting and pigsticking were two tennis afternoons weekly, one at the Residency, the other at the Mess.  Here the dozen or so Europeans, who knew every line of each other’s faces by heart gathered regularly from sheer boredom whether the game amused them or not.  Neither Mrs. Trevor nor her bosom-friend Mrs. Baird, the regimental surgeon’s better half, ever attempted it; but they invariably attended and sat together, usually talking scandal of Mrs. Norton as she played or chatted with the men.  Mrs. Trevor’s chief grievance against her was that the General Commanding the Division, when he came to inspect the battalion, took the younger woman in to dinner, for, as her husband the Resident was the Viceroy’s representative, she could claim precedence over the wife of a mere regimental commandant.  No English village is so full of petty squabbles and malicious gossip as a small Indian station.

Like everyone else in the land Wargrave hated most those terrible hours of the hot weather between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon.  He and Raymond passed them, like so many thousands of their kind elsewhere, shut up in their comfortless bungalow, which was darkened and closely shuttered to exclude the awful heat and the blinding glare outside.  Too hot to read or write, almost to smoke, they lay in long cane chairs, gasping and perspiring freely, while the whining punkah overhead barely stirred the heated air.  One exterior window on the windward side of the bungalow was filled with a thick mat of dried and odorous kuskus grass, against which every quarter of an hour the bheestie threw water to wet it thoroughly so that the hot breeze that swept over the burning sand outside might enter cooled by the evaporation of the water.

But Frank found alleviation and comfort in frequent visits to the Residency, where Mrs. Norton and he spent the baking hours of the afternoon absorbed in making music or singing duets.  For Violet had a well-trained voice which harmonised well with his.  No thought of sex seemed to obtrude itself on them.  They were just playmates, comrades, nothing more.

Yet it was only natural that the woman’s vanity should be flattered by the man’s eagerness to seek her society and by his evident pleasure in it.  And it was delightful to have at last a sympathetic listener to all her little grievances, one who seemed as interested in her petty household worries or the delinquencies of her London milliner in failing to execute her orders properly as in her greater complaint against the fate that condemned a woman of her artistic and gaiety-loving nature to existence in the wilds and to the society of persons so uncongenial to her as were the majority of the white folk of Rohar.