“I know.  Trust me.  Good-bye,” and he cantered off.

I confess I was very dejected and low-spirited when I came back into camp.  My acquaintance with Isaacs, so suddenly grown into intimacy, had become a part of my life.  I felt a sort of devotion to him that I had never felt for any man in my life before.  I would rather have gone with him to Keitung, for a presentiment told me there was trouble in the wind.  He had not talked to me about the Baithopoor intrigue, for everything was as much settled beforehand as it was possible to settle anything.  There was nothing to be said, for all that was to come was action; but I knew Isaacs distrusted the maharajah, and that without Ram Lal’s assistance—­of whatever nature that might prove to be—­he would not have ventured to go alone to such a tryst.

When I returned the camp was all alive, for it was nearly seven o’clock.  Kildare and the collector, my servant said, had gone off on tats to shoot some small game.  Mr. Ghyrkins was occupied with the shikarries in the stretching and dressing of the skin he had won the previous day.  Neither Miss Westonhaugh nor her brother had been seen.  So I dressed and rested myself and had some tea, and sat wondering what the camp would be like without Isaacs, who, to me and to one other person, was emphatically, as Ghyrkins had said the night before, the life of the party.  The weather was not so warm as on the previous day, and I was debating whether I should not try and induce the younger men to go and stick a pig—­the shikarry said there were plenty in some place he knew of—­or whether I should settle myself in the dining-tent for a long day with my books, when the arrival of a mounted messenger with some letters from the distant post-office decided me in favour of the more peaceful disposition of my time.  So I glanced at the papers, and assured myself that the English were going deeper and deeper into the mire of difficulties and reckless expenditure that characterised their campaign in Afghanistan in the autumn of 1879; and when I had assured myself, furthermore, by the perusal of a request for the remittance of twenty pounds, that my nephew, the only relation, male or female, that I have in the world, had not come to the untimely death he so richly deserved, I fell to considering what book I should read.  And from one thing to another, I found myself established about ten o’clock at the table in the dining-tent, with Miss Westonhaugh at one side, worsted work, writing materials and all, just as she had been at the same table a week or so before.  At her request I had continued my writing when she came in.  I was finishing off a column of a bloodthirsty article for the Howler; it probably would come near enough to the mark, for in India you may print a leader anywhere within a month of its being written, and if it was hot enough to begin with, it will still answer the purpose.  Journalism is not so rapid in its requirements as in New York, but, on the other hand, it is more lucrative.