He put his arm about her.  “Always, dear,” he said.

She raised her face.  She was still trembling, but her action was one of resolute confidence.  “Then let’s be friends, Billikins!” she said.

It was a tacit invitation.  He bent and gravely kissed her.

Her lips returned his kiss shyly, quiveringly.  “You’re the nicest man I ever met, Billikins,” she said.  “Good-night!”

She slipped from his encircling arm and was gone.

The man stood motionless where she had left him, wondering at himself, at her, at the whole rocking universe.  She had kindled the Magic Fire in him indeed!  His whole being was aglow.  And yet—­and yet—­she had had her way with him.  He had let her go.

Wherefore?  Wherefore?  The hot blood dinned in his ears.  His hands clenched.  And from very deep within him the answer came.  Because he loved her.

CHAPTER V

THE WOMAN

Summer in the Plains!  Pitiless, burning summer!

All day a blinding blaze of sun beat upon the wooden roof, forced a way through the shaded windows, lay like a blasting spell upon the parched compound.  The cluster-roses had shrivelled and died long since.  Their brown leaves still clung to the veranda and rattled desolately with a dry, scaly sound in the burning wind of dawn.

The green parakeets had ceased to look for sweets on the veranda.  Nothing dainty ever made its appearance there.  The Englishman who came and went with such grim endurance offered them no temptations.

Sometimes he spent the night on a charpoy on the veranda, lying motionless, though often sleepless, through the breathless, dragging hours.  There had been sickness among the officers and Merryon, who was never sick, was doing the work of three men.  He did it doggedly, with the stubborn determination characteristic of him; not cheerfully—­no one ever accused Merryon of being cheerful—­but efficiently and uncomplainingly.  Other men cursed the heat, but he never took the trouble.  He needed all his energies for what he had to do.

His own chance of leave had become very remote.  There was so much sick leave that he could not be spared.  Over that, also, he made no complaint.  It was useless to grumble at the inevitable.  There was not a man in the mess who could not be spared more easily than he.

For he was indomitable, unfailing, always fulfilling his duties with machine-like regularity, stern, impenetrable, hard as granite.

As to what lay behind that hardness, no one ever troubled to inquire.  They took him for granted, much as if he had been a well-oiled engine guaranteed to surmount all obstacles.  How he did it was nobody’s business but his own.  If he suffered in that appalling heat as other men suffered, no one knew of it.  If he grew a little grimmer and a little gaunter, no one noticed.  Everyone knew that whatever happened to others, he at least would hold on.  Everyone described him as “hard as nails.”