With an air of pretended boredom and martyr-like resignation, her brother put down his coffee-cup and came out on the verandah.

“Isn’t it like Fairyland?” said the girl in an awed voice.

He put his arm affectionately round her, as he replied: 

“Then it’s where you belong, kiddie, for you look like a fairy this morning.”

The hackneyed compliment, unusual from the lips of a brother, was not far-fetched.  If a dainty little figure, an exquisitely pretty dimpled face, a shell-pink complexion, violet eyes with long, thick lashes, and naturally wavy golden hair be the hallmarks of the fairies, then Noreen Daleham might claim to be one.  Her face in repose had a somewhat sad expression, due to the pathetic droop of the corners of her little mouth and a wistful look in her eyes that made most men instinctively desire to caress and console her.  But the sadness and the wistfulness were unconscious and untrue, for the girl was of a sunny and happy disposition.  And the men that desired to pet her were kept at a distance by her natural self-respect, which made them respect her, too.

She was, perhaps, somewhat unusual in her generation in that she did not indulge in flirtations and would have strongly objected to being the object of promiscuous caresses and light lovemaking.  Her innate purity and innocence kept such things at a distance from her.  It never occurred to her that a girl might indulge in a hundred flirtations without reproach.  Without being sentimental she had her own inward, unexpressed feelings of romance and vague dreams of Love and a Lover—­but not of loves and lovers in the plural.

No one so far had shattered her belief in the chivalrous feeling of respect of the other sex for her own.  Men as a rule, especially British men—­though they are no more virtuous than those of alien nations—­treat a woman as she inwardly wants them to treat her.  And, although this girl was over twenty, she had never yet had reason to suspect that men could behave to her with anything but respect.

Her small and shapely figure looked to advantage in the well-cut riding costume of khaki drill that she wore this morning.  A cloth habit would have been too warm for even these early days of an Eastern Bengal hot weather.  She was ready to accompany her brother in his early ride through the tea-garden (of which he was assistant manager) in the Duars, as this district of the Terai below the mountains is called.  From the verandah on which they stood they could look over acres of trim and tidy bushes planted in orderly rows, a strong contrast to the wild disorder of the big trees and masses of foliage of the forest that lay beyond them and stretched to and along the foothills of the Himalayas only a few miles away.