It was Madeline's fancy to enjoy the contrast between West and East
in all its sharpness, so she and Brookes embarked at San Francisco
for Yokohama. Their wanderings in Japan were ideal, in spite of
Brookes's ungrateful statement that she could have done with fewer
eggs and more bacon; and Madeline prolonged the appeal of the
country to her sense of humour and fantasy, putting off her
departure for India from week to week. She went at last in March;
and found herself down with fever at Benares in the middle of one
particularly hot April, two months after the last of her fellow
travellers had sailed from Bombay, haunted on her baking pillow by
pictorial views of the burning ghat and the vultures. The station
doctor, using appalling language to her punkah-coolie, ordered her
to the hills; and thus it was that she went to Simla, where she had
no intention of going, and where this story really begins.

Brookes has always declared that Providence in sending Miss Anderson
to Simla had it in mind to prevent a tragedy; but as to that there
is room for a difference of opinion: besides I can not be
anticipated by Brookes.

'It's the oddest place imaginable, and in many ways the most
delightful,' Madeline wrote to her sister Adele, 'this microcosm of
Indian official society withdrawn from all the world, and playing at
being a municipality on three Himalayan mountaintops. You can't
imagine its individuality, its airy, unsubstantial, superior poise.
How can I explain to you elderly gentlemen, whose faces express
daily electric communications with the Secretary of State, playing
tennis violently every single afternoon in striped flannels--writing
letters of admonition to the Amir all day long, and in the evening,