“Thank you very much, Colonel.  I promise you I’ll go at them hard.”

“You’ll have a fellow-student for part of the time.  Miss Benson’s coming to stay with us during the Monsoons for a bit; and she has asked me to teach her Bhutanese, too.  She wants it, as she has to deal with Bhuttia woodcutters and hill folk generally.  Well, that’s fixed.  Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, sir,” answered the subaltern, as he lay down on the pad and stared at the stars.  He was overjoyed at Colonel Dermot’s offer, and as he dropped asleep it was with a thrill of pleasure that he realised he would see something more of the girl who had been his companion that day.

CHAPTER X

A POLITICAL OFFICER IN THE MAKING

The lightning spattered the heavens and tore the black sky into a thousand fragments, the thunder crashed in appalling peals of terrifying sound which echoed again and again from the invisible mountains.  The rain fell in ropes of water that sent the brown, foam-flecked torrents surging full-fed down every gully and ravine in the mist-wrapped hills.  The single, steep road of Ranga Duar was now the rocky bed of a racing flood inches deep that swirled and raged round Wargrave’s high rubber boots as he waded up towards the Mess clad in an oilskin coat, off which the rain splashed.  He was glad to arrive at the garden gate, turn in through it, climb the verandah steps, and reach his door.  Here he flung aside his coat and kicked off the heavy boots.

Entering his room he pulled on his slippers, filled his pipe with tobacco from a lime-dried bottle and sat down at his one rickety table at the window.  Then he took out of his pocket and laid before him a manuscript book filled with notes on the frontier dialects taken at the lesson with Colonel Dermot from which he had just come.  He opened it mechanically but did not even glance at it.  His thoughts were elsewhere.

Months had elapsed since the day on which he had seen his first tiger killed.  Not long afterwards the Rains had come to put a stop to descents into the jungle.  But his interest in the preparation for his new work compensated him for the imprisonment within walls by the terrible tropical storms and the never-ceasing downpour.  He had flung himself enthusiastically into the study of the frontier languages, of which Colonel Dermot proved to be a painstaking and able teacher.  Miss Benson, who had returned to Ranga Duar and remained there longer than she had originally intended, owing to fever contracted in the jungle, joined him in these studies and astonished her fellow-pupil by her aptitude and quickness of apprehension.  But her presence proved disastrous to him.  Thrown constantly together as they were, spending hours every day side by side, the subaltern realised to his dismay that he was falling in love with the girl.

It would have been strange had it been otherwise so pretty and attractive was she.  Often Mrs. Dermot, peeping into her husband’s office and seeing the dark and the fair head bent close together over a book, smiled to herself, well-pleased at the thought of her favourites being mutually attracted.  To her husband the thought never occurred.  Men are very dull in these matters.