“It’s rather a dull house for poor Sophy,” suggested her friend; “when her aunt has one of her bad attacks she sees no visitors for days.  Mr. Krauss is absent from morning till night—­not that I consider his absence any loss, for I dislike him more than words can express.”

“Well, I can’t say that I am one of his admirers,” admitted Mrs. Gregory; “but I agree with you that Sophy has some long and lonely hours; she can come over here whenever she pleases, and she cannot come too often, for she is a dear girl, and I would be glad to have her altogether.  You know she and I were house-mates up at May Myo, and when you live with another person in a small bungalow that is your opportunity to get down to the bed-rock of character.”

It was about a week after the elephants had been transported across the river, and Sophy and Fuchsia were sitting in the latter’s bedroom at the “Barn.”  Sophy was altering a hat for her companion; she was remarkably clever in this line, and a surprising quantity of her friends’ millinery had passed through her fingers.

“Mr. Shafto had a narrow squeak this day week,” remarked Fuchsia, who was lounging in a chair, doing nothing.  “Did you hear someone say that he was pushed in?”

“Oh, no!  By accident—­or on purpose?”

“Whichever you please; the result was the same.”  Then, after a considerable pause, she added significantly: 

“Perhaps he knows too much.”

“Too much of what?” asked Sophy, looking up.

“Oh, there are many secrets in Rangoon,” said Fuchsia, nodding her head; “I have grasped that, although I have only been here two months, and you a whole year.  Have you never noticed anything?  Have you no suspicions about people?”

“No—­not of anything that matters.  I suspect that the eldest Miss Wiggin rouges and darkens her eyebrows, that Lady Puffle wears a wig, and that the Grahams are thoroughly sick of their paying guest.  But you are ten times cleverer than I am, Fuchsia, and, according to Mr. Gregory, singularly intelligent and acute.”

“Acute—­rubbish!” Fuchsia dismissed the idea with a gesture of her tiny hand.  “I’m not thinking of wigs, or paint, or such piffle.  Say, have you never heard of the cocaine business?”

“Oh, yes; Mr. Shafto is tremendously keen on the subject.”

“Pat FitzGerald is mad about it, too, and is having a great big try to rope in the boss smugglers.  He has told me the most terrible tales.  Once the drug—­it’s cocaine and morphia mixed—­gets a fast hold of a man, or woman, he or she is doomed!”

“Oh, Fuchsia, surely not so bad as that!”

“It’s true; the poor thieve to get a few annas to spend in the dens; the rich and educated buy it by stealth, and absorb it at home in secret.”

“What are the symptoms?” inquired Sophy.  “Have you ever seen anyone who took those drugs?”

“Well, I could not say,” she answered evasively; “but I am aware that the symptoms are unaccountable drowsiness and lethargy, followed by a deathlike sleep, and, they say, the most heavenly dreams.  Later, the dreamer wakes up, haggard, feverish, and miserable; the skin has a dried, shrunken look.  And you can always tell a drug-taker by the eyes; the pupil is either as small as a pin’s point or else enormously enlarged.”