Daleham’s father, a retired colonel, has died just as the boy was preparing to go up for the entrance examination for the Royal Military College at Sandhurst.  To his great grief he was obliged to give up all hope of becoming a soldier, and, when he left school, entered an office in the city.  Passionately desirous of an open-air and active life he had afterwards eagerly snatched at an offer of employment by one of the great tea companies that are dotting the Terai with their plantations and sweeping away glorious spaces of wild, primeval forest to replace the trees by orderly rows of tea-bushes and unsightly iron-roofed factories.

Left with a small income inherited from her mother, Noreen Daleham, who was two years her brother’s junior, had gladly given up the dulness of a home with an aunt in a small country town to accompany her brother and keep house for him.

To most girls life on an Indian tea-garden would not seem alluring; for they would find themselves far from social gaieties and the society of their kind.  Existence is lonely and lacking in the comforts, as well as the luxuries, of civilisation.  Dances, theatres, concerts, even shops, are far, very far away.  A woman must have mental resources to enable her to face contentedly life in a scantily-furnished, comfortless bungalow, dumped down in a monotonous stretch of unlovely tea-bushes.  With little to occupy her she must rely for days at a time on the sole companionship of her man.  To a young bride very much in love that may seem no hardship.  But when the glamour has vanished she may change her mind.

To Noreen, however, the isolation was infinitely preferable to the narrow-minded and unfriendly intimacy of society in a country town with its snobbery and cliques.  To be mistress of her own home and to be able to look after and mother her dearly-loved brother was a pleasant change from her position as a cipher in the household of a crotchetty, unsympathetic, maiden aunt.  And fortunately for her the charm of the silent forest around them, the romance of the mysterious jungle with its dangers and its wonders, appealed strongly to her, and she preferred them to all the pleasures that London could offer.  And yet the delights of town were not unknown to her.  Her father’s first cousin, who had loved him but married a rich man, often invited the girl to stay with her in her house in Grosvenor Square.  These visits gave her an insight into life in Mayfair with its attendant pleasures of dances in smart houses, dinners and suppers in expensive restaurants, the Opera and theatres, and afternoons at Ranelagh and Hurlingham.  She enjoyed them all; she had enough money to dress well; and she was very popular.  But London could not hold her.  Her relative, who was childless, was anxious that Noreen should remain always with her, at least until she married—­and the older woman determined that the girl should make an advantageous marriage.  But the latter knew that her income was very welcome to her aunt and, with a spirit of self-sacrifice not usual in the young, gave up a gay, fashionable life for the dull existence of a paying drudge in the house of an ungrateful, embittered elderly spinster.  Yet her heart rejoiced when she conscientiously felt that her brother needed her more and had a greater claim upon her; and gladly she went to keep house for him in India.