Often, as Dermot sat high perched on the mountain side, searching the narrow valleys and deep ravines of Bhutan with powerful glasses, his thoughts flew to Noreen safe beyond the giant hills at his back.  It cheered him to know that he was watching over her safety as well as guarding the peace of hundreds of millions in the same land.  He had seldom seen her since their return from Lalpuri, and on the rare occasions of their meeting she seemed to avoid him more than ever.  Chunerbutty was always by her side.  Could there be truth, then, in this fresh story that Ida Smith had told him on their last night at the Palace, when she said that she had discovered that she was mistaken in believing in Noreen’s approaching betrothal to Charlesworth, of which she had assured him in Darjeeling?  For at Lalpuri she said she had extracted from the girl the confession that she had refused the Rifleman and others for love of someone in the Plains below.  And Ida, judging from Chunerbutty’s constant attendance on, and proprietorial manner with Noreen, confided to Dermot her firm belief that the Bengali was the man.

The thought was unbearable to the soldier.  As he sat in his lonely eyrie he knew now that he loved the girl, that it would be unbearable for him to see her another’s wife.  Those few days at Lalpuri, when first he felt the estrangement between them, had revealed the truth to him.  When in the courtyard of the Palace he saw Death rushing on him he had given her what he believed would be his last thought.

He recalled her charm, her delightful comradeship, her brightness, and her beauty.  It was hateful to think that she would dower this renegade Hindu with them all.  Dermot had no unjust prejudice against the natives of the land in which so much of his life was passed.  Like every officer in the Indian Army he loved his sepoys and regarded them as his children.  Their troubles, their welfare, were his.  He respected the men of those gallant warrior races that once had faced the British valiantly in battle and fought as loyally beside them since.  But for the effeminate and cowardly peoples of India, that ever crawled to kiss the feet of each conqueror of the peninsula in turn and then stabbed him in the back if they could, he had the contempt that every member of the martial races of the land, every Sikh, Rajput, Gurkha, Punjaubi had.

The girl would scarcely have refused so good a match as Charlesworth or come away heart-whole from Darjeeling, where so many had striven for her favour, if she had gone there without a prior attachment.  That she cared for no man in England he was sure, for she had often told him that she had no desire to return to that country.  He had seen her among the planters of the district and was certain that she loved none of them.  Only Chunerbutty was left; it must indeed be he.

He shut up his binoculars and climbed down the rocky pinnacle on which he had been perched, and went to eat a cheerless meal where Badshah grazed a thousand feet below.