Major Dermot was no lover of these mountain Capuas of Hindustan, and had gladly escaped from Simla, chiefest of them all.  Yet now he sat in his little stone bungalow in Ranga Duar, while the terrific thunder crashed and roared among the hills, and read with a pleased smile an official letter ordering him to proceed forthwith to Darjeeling—­as gay a pleasure colony as any—­to meet the General Commanding the Division, who was visiting the place on inspection duty.  For the same post had brought him a letter from Noreen Daleham which told him that she was then, and had been for some time, in that hill-station.

The climate of the Terai, unpleasantly but not unbearably hot in the summer months, is pestilential and deadly during the rains, when malaria and the more dreaded black-water fever take toll of the strongest.  Noreen had suffered in health in the hot weather, and her brother was seriously concerned at the thought of her being obliged to remain in Malpura throughout the Monsoon.  He could not take her to the Hills; it was impossible for him to absent himself even for a few days from the garden, for the care and management of it was devolving more and more every day on him, owing to the intemperate habits of Parry.

Fred Daleham’s relief was great when his sister unexpectedly received a letter from a former school-friend who two years before had married a man in the Indian Civil Service.  Noreen, who was a good deal her junior, had corresponded regularly with her, and she now wrote to say that she was going to Darjeeling for the Season and suggested that Noreen should join her there.  Much as the prospect of seeing a friend whom she had idolised, appealed to the girl (to say nothing of the gaieties of a hill-station and the pleasure of seeing shops, real shops, again), she was nevertheless unwilling to leave her brother.  But Fred insisted on her going.

From Darjeeling she told Dermot in a long and chatty epistle all her sensations and experiences in this new world.  It was her first real letter to him, although she had written him a few short notes from Malpura.  It was interesting and clever, without any attempt to be so, and Dermot was surprised at the accuracy of her judgment of men and things and the vividness of her descriptions.  He noticed, moreover, that the social gaieties of Darjeeling did not engross her.  She enjoyed dancing, but the many balls, At Homes, and other social functions did not attract her so much as the riding and tennis, the sight-seeing, the glimpses of the strange and varied races that fill the Darjeeling bazaar, and, above all, the glories of the superb scenery where the ice-crowned monarch of all mountains, Kinchinjunga, forty miles away—­though not seeming five—­and twenty-nine thousand feet high, towers up above the white line of the Eternal Snows.

Dermot was critically pleased with the letter.  Few men—­and he least of all—­care for an empty-headed doll whose only thoughts are of dress and fashionable entertainments.  He liked the girl for her love of sport and action, for her intelligence, and the interest she took in the varied native life around her.  He was almost tempted to think that her letter betrayed some desire for his companionship in Darjeeling, for in it she constantly wondered what he would think of this, what he would say of that.