CHAPTER

   1.  Blinds down
   2.  What Hannah said
   3.  The closed house
   4.  Kicks and HALFPENCE
   5.  Clouds
   6.  An empty offer
   7.  “The monster”
   8.  Bound for Burma
   9.  The “Blankshire”
  10.  The land of promise
  11.  A Burmese hostess
  12.  East and West
  13.  “Keep an eye upon her”
  14.  The mantle of Fernanda
  15.  The chummery
  16.  Mr. And Mrs. ABELSALTER
  17.  At the play
  18.  The Chinese shop
  19.  Chaff
  20.  The pongye
  21.  The cocaine den
  22.  The approaching dread
  23.  Mystery and suspicion
  24.  Sentence of death
  25.  The late Richard Roscoe
  26.  Fitzgerald imparts information
  27.  A rope trick
  28.  Ma chit
  29.  Mung Baw
  30.  Enlightenment
  31.  Seeing is believing
  32.  On duty
  33.  Sophy
  34.  All is over
  35.  Mung Baw lies low
  36.  The bombshell
  37.  The tug of war
  38.  Sergeant-major Ryan

THE ROAD TO MANDALAY

CHAPTER I

BLINDS DOWN

“What do you think, Mitty?  All the blinds are down at ‘Littlecote,’” announced Miss Jane Tebbs, bursting open the drawing-room door and disturbing her sister in a surreptitious game of patience.  In well-ordered households the mistress is understood to have various domestic tasks claiming her attention in the morning.  Cards should never appear until after sunset.

“Blinds down?” echoed Miss Tebbs, hastily moving a newspaper in the hope of concealing her ill-doing.  “Why are you in such a taking, Jane?  I suppose the family are away.”

“Rubbish!” exclaimed her relative, sinking into a chair and dragging off her gloves.  “Did you ever know them all away together?  Of course, Mrs. Shafto goes gadding, and Douglas is at Sandhurst, but ‘he’ seldom stirs.  It is my opinion that something has happened.  The Shaftos have lived at ‘Littlecote’ for ten years, and I have never seen the blinds down before to-day.”

“Oh, you are so fussy and ready to imagine things!” grumbled Mitty, who meanwhile had collected and pocketed the cards with surpassing dexterity.  “I don’t forget the time when the curate had a smart lady in his lodgings, and you nearly went out of your mind:  rampaging up and down the village, and telling everyone that the bishop must be informed; and after all your outcry she turned out to be the young man’s mother!”

“That’s true.  I confess I was misled; but she made herself up to look like a girl of twenty.  You can’t deny that she powdered her nose and wore white shoes.  But this is different.  Drawn blinds are a sign of trouble, and there is trouble at ‘Littlecote,’ as sure as my name is Jane.”

“Then, in that case, why don’t you go up to the house and inquire?”—­The query suggested a challenge.