Proposals of marriage were not showered on her, as persons ignorant of Anglo-Indian life fondly believe to be the lot of every English girl there.  While a dowerless maiden still has a much better chance of securing a husband in a land where maidens are few and bachelors are many, yet the day has long gone by when every spinster who had drawn a blank in England could be shipped off to India with the certainty of finding a spouse there.  Frequent leave and fast steamers have altered that.  When a man can go home in a fortnight every year or second year he is not as anxious to snatch at the first maiden who appears in his station as his predecessor who lived in India in the days when a voyage to England took six months.  And men in the East are as a rule not anxious to marry.  A wife out there is a handicap at every turn.  She adds enormously to his expenses, and her society too often lends more brightness to the existence of his fellows than his own.  Children are ruinous luxuries.  Bachelor life in Mess or club is too pleasant, sport that a single man can enjoy more readily than a married one too attractive, rupees too few for what Kipling terms “the wild ass of the desert” to be willing to put his head into the halter readily.

Yet men do marry in India—­one wonders why!—­and a girl there has so many opportunities of meeting the opposite sex every day, and so little rivalry, that her chances in the matrimonial market are infinitely better than at home.  In stations in the Plains there are usually four or five men to every woman in its limited society, and the proportion of bachelors to spinsters is far greater.  Sometimes in a military cantonment with five or six batteries and regiments in it, which, with departmental officers, may furnish a total of eighty to a hundred unmarried men from subalterns to colonels, there may be only one or two unwedded girls.  The lower ranks are worse off for English spinster society; for the private soldier there is none.

Noreen’s two most constant attendants were Charlesworth and Melville.  The Indian Army officer’s devotion and earnestness were patent to the world, but the Rifleman’s intentions were a problem and a source of dispute among the women, who in Indian stations not less than other places watch the progress of every love-affair with the eyes of hawks.  It was doubtful if Charlesworth himself knew what he wanted.  He was a man who loved his liberty and his right to make love to each and every woman who caught his fancy.  Noreen’s casual liking for him but her frank indifference to him in any other capacity than that of a pleasant companion with whom to ride, dance, or play tennis, piqued him, but not sufficiently to make him risk losing his cherished freedom.

Chunerbutty left Darjeeling after a week’s stay.  Parry, having become sufficiently sober to enquire after him and learn of his absence, demanded his instant return in a telegram so profanely worded that it shocked even the Barwahi post-office babu. The engineer called on Noreen to say good-bye, and offered to be the bearer of a message to her brother.  He kept up to the end the fable of his sick father.