He could not tell her the real reason of his coming to Darjeeling.  The truth was that he had learned that the Rajah had inspired the attempt by the Bhuttias to carry off Noreen and wanted to see and upbraid him for his deceit and treachery to their agreement.  There had been a furious quarrel when the two accomplices met.  The Rajah taunted the other with his lack of success with Noreen and the failure of his plan to persuade her to marry him.  Chunerbutty retorted that he had not been allowed sufficient time to win the favour of an English girl, who, unlike Indian maidens, was free to choose her own husband.  And he threatened to inform the Government if any further attempt against her were made without his knowledge and approval.  But the quarrel did not last long.  Each scoundrel needed the help of the other.  Still, Chunerbutty judged it safer to remove himself from the Rajah’s house and find a lodging elsewhere, lest any deplorable accident might occur to him under his patron’s roof.

After the engineer’s departure Noreen seldom saw the Rajah, and then only at official entertainments, to which his position gained him invitations.  He spoke to her once or twice at these receptions, but as a rule she contrived to elude him.

So far she had got on very well with Mrs. Smith.  Their wills had never clashed, for the girl unselfishly gave in to her friend whenever the latter demanded it, which was often enough.  Ida’s ways were certainly not Noreen’s, and the latter sometimes felt tempted to disapprove of her excessive familiarity with Captain Bain and one or two others.  But the next moment she took herself severely to task for being censorious of the elder woman, who must surely know better how to behave towards men than a young unmarried girl who had been buried so long in the jungle.  And Ida did not guess why sometimes her repentant little friend’s caresses were so fervent and her desire to please her so manifest, and ascribed it all to her own sweetness of nature.

The coming of the Rains did not check the gaiety of the dwellers on the mountain-tops, though torrential downpours had to be faced on black nights in shrouded rickshas and dripping dandies, though incessant lightning lit up the road to the club or theatre, and the thunder made it difficult to hear the music of the band in the ballroom.  Noreen missed nothing of the revels.  But in all the whirl of gaiety and pleasure in which her days were passed her thoughts turned more and more to the great forest lying thousands of feet below her, and the man who passed his lonely days therein.

Little news of him came to her.  He never wrote, and her brother seldom mentioned him in his letters; for during Parker’s absence on two months’ privilege leave from Ranga Duar Dermot did not quit it often and very rarely visited the planters’ club or the bungalows of any of its members.  And Noreen wanted news of him.  Much as she saw of other men now—­many of them attractive