Daly, who was the Acting Quartermaster of the battalion, told him that the arrangements for his journey had been made.  He was to leave at dawn and drive sixty miles in a tonga—­a two-wheeled native conveyance drawn by a pair of ponies—­to a village called Basedi on the shores of a narrow gulf or deep inlet of the sea which formed the eastern boundary of the State of Mandha.  Here he would have to spend the night in a dak-bungalow—­or rest-house—­and cross the water in a steam-launch next morning.  After that, five days more of travel by various routes and means awaited him.

Before dinner that night a few minutes apart with Hepburn made Frank happier than he had been all day.  For his Company Commander told him that he had only agreed with the Colonel’s action because he believed that it would be for the subaltern’s own good, not because he considered that the latter had done anything to disgrace him.  Hepburn added that if he was given command of the regiment in two years’ time—­as should happen in the ordinary course of events—­he would be glad to have Wargrave back again in the battalion then.  Frank, with a guilty feeling when he remembered his compact with Violet, thanked him gratefully, and with a lightened heart went to the very festive meal that was to be his last for some long time, at least with his old corps.

The Colonel had refused to agree to his being invited formally to be the guest of the regiment; and neither he nor the other married man, the Doctor, were present.  If they slept that night they were the only two officers in the Cantonment that did; for none of the others, not even senior major, Hepburn, left the Mess until it was time to escort their departing comrade to his bungalow to change for the journey.  And, as the tonga-ponies rattled down the road and bore him away, Frank’s last sight of his old comrades was the group of white-clad figures in the dawn waving frantically and cheering vociferously from the gateway of his bungalow.

The memory of it rejoiced him throughout the terrible hours of the long journey in the baking heat and blinding glare of the Hot Weather day.  The worse moments were the stops every ten miles to change ponies, when he had to wait in the blazing sunshine.  His “boy,” who sat on the front seat of the vehicle beside the driver, produced from a basket packed with wet straw cooled bottles of soda-water, without which Wargrave felt that he would have died of sunstroke.

Then on after each halt; and the endless strip of white road again unrolled before him, while the never-ceasing clank of the iron-shod bar coupling the ponies maddened his aching head with its monotonous rhythm.

As the weary miles slid past him his thoughts were with Violet, so beautiful, so patient and brave in her self-denying endurance.  And he cursed himself for having added to her pain, and inwardly vowed that some day he would atone to her for it.