It is conceivable that her aunts would not have approved of a girl who never set foot on the ground if a horse were within hail; who rode to dances with a shawl thrown over her skirt; who wore her hair cropped and curling all over her head; who answered indifferently to the name of William or Bill; whose speech was heavy with the flowers of the vernacular; who could act in amateur theatricals, play on the banjo, rule eight servants and two horses, their accounts and their diseases, and look men slowly and deliberately between the eyes—­yea, after they had proposed to her and been rejected.

‘I like men who do things,’ she had confided to a man in the Educational Department, who was teaching the sons of cloth merchants and dyers the beauty of Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion’ in annotated cram-books; and when he grew poetical, William explained that she ‘didn’t understand poetry very much; it made her head ache,’ and another broken heart took refuge at the Club.  But it was all William’s fault.  She delighted in hearing men talk of their own work, and that is the most fatal way of bringing a man to your feet.

Scott had known her more or less for some three years, meeting her, as a rule, under canvas when his camp and her brother’s joined for a day on the edge of the Indian Desert.  He had danced with her several times at the big Christmas gatherings, when as many as five hundred white people came into the station; and he had always a great respect for her housekeeping and her dinners.

She looked more like a boy than ever when, after their meal, she sat, one foot tucked under her, on the leather camp-sofa, rolling cigarettes for her brother, her low forehead puckered beneath the dark curls as she twiddled the papers.  She stuck out her rounded chin when the tobacco stayed in place, and, with a gesture as true as a school-boy’s throwing a stone, tossed the finished article across the room to Martyn, who caught it with one hand, and continued his talk with Scott.  It was all ’shop,’—­canals and the policing of canals; the sins of villagers who stole more water than they had paid for, and the grosser sin of native constables who connived at the thefts; of the transplanting bodily of villages to newly-irrigated ground, and of the coming fight with the desert in the south when the Provincial funds should warrant the opening of the long-surveyed Luni Protective Canal System.  And Scott spoke openly of his great desire to be put on one particular section of the work where he knew the land and the people, and Martyn sighed for a billet in the Himalayan foot-hills, and spoke his mind of his superiors, and William rolled cigarettes and said nothing, but smiled gravely on her brother because he was happy.

At ten Scott’s horse came to the door, and the evening was ended.

The lights of the two low bungalows in which the daily paper was printed showed bright across the road.  It was too early to try to find sleep, and Scott drifted over to the editor.  Raines, stripped to the waist like a sailor at a gun, lay in a long chair, waiting for night telegrams.  He had a theory that if a man did not stay by his work all day and most of the night he laid himself open to fever; so he ate and slept among his files.