‘Don’t know,’ said the Deputy Commissioner reflectively.  ’We’ve got locusts with us.  There’s sporadic cholera all along the north—­at least we’re calling it sporadic for decency’s sake.  The spring crops are short in five districts, and nobody seems to know where the rains are.  It’s nearly March now.  I don’t want to scare anybody, but it seems to me that Nature’s going to audit her accounts with a big red pencil this summer.’

‘Just when I wanted to take leave, too!’ said a voice across the room.

’There won’t be much leave this year, but there ought to be a great deal of promotion.  I’ve come in to persuade the Government to put my pet canal on the list of famine-relief works.  It’s an ill-wind that blows no good.  I shall get that canal finished at last.’

‘Is it the old programme then,’ said Holden; ’famine, fever, and cholera?’

’Oh no.  Only local scarcity and an unusual prevalence of seasonal sickness.  You’ll find it all in the reports if you live till next year.  You’re a lucky chap.  You haven’t got a wife to send out of harm’s way.  The hill-stations ought to be full of women this year.’

‘I think you’re inclined to exaggerate the talk in the bazars’ said a young civilian in the Secretariat.  ‘Now I have observed—­’

‘I daresay you have,’ said the Deputy Commissioner, ’but you’ve a great deal more to observe, my son.  In the meantime, I wish to observe to you—­’ and he drew him aside to discuss the construction of the canal that was so dear to his heart.  Holden went to his bungalow and began to understand that he was not alone in the world, and also that he was afraid for the sake of another,—­which is the most soul-satisfying fear known to man.

Two months later, as the Deputy had foretold, Nature began to audit her accounts with a red pencil.  On the heels of the spring-reapings came a cry for bread, and the Government, which had decreed that no man should die of want, sent wheat.  Then came the cholera from all four quarters of the compass.  It struck a pilgrim-gathering of half a million at a sacred shrine.  Many died at the feet of their god; the others broke and ran over the face of the land carrying the pestilence with them.  It smote a walled city and killed two hundred a day.  The people crowded the trains, hanging on to the footboards and squatting on the roofs of the carriages, and the cholera followed them, for at each station they dragged out the dead and the dying.  They died by the roadside, and the horses of the Englishmen shied at the corpses in the grass.  The rains did not come, and the earth turned to iron lest man should escape death by hiding in her.  The English sent their wives away to the hills and went about their work, coming forward as they were bidden to fill the gaps in the fighting-line.  Holden, sick with fear of losing his chiefest treasure on earth, had done his best to persuade Ameera to go away with her mother to the Himalayas.