A GIRL OF THE TERAI

"How beautiful! How wonderful!" murmured the girl on the verandah, her eyes
turned to the long line of the Himalayas filling the horizon to the north.

Clear against the blue sky the shining, ice-clad peaks of Kinchinjunga, a
hundred miles away, towered high in air. Mystic, lovely, they seemed to
float above the earth, as unsubstantial as the clouds from which they rose.
They belonged to another world, a fairy world altogether apart from the
rugged, tumbled masses, the awe-inspiring precipices and tremendous cliffs,
of the nearer mountains. These were majestic, overpowering, but plainly of
this earth, unlike the pure, white summits that seemed unreal, impossible
in their beauty.

"Do come and look, Fred," said the girl aloud. "I've never seen the Snows
so clearly."

She spoke to the solitary occupant of the dining-room of the bungalow. The
young man at the breakfast table answered laughingly:

"I don't want to look at those confounded hills, Sis. I've seen them,
nothing but them, all through these long months, until I begin to hate the
sight of them."

"Oh, but do come, dear!" she pleaded. "Kinchinjunga has never seemed so
beautiful as it does this morning. And it looks so near. Who could believe
that it was all those miles away?"

With an air of pretended boredom and martyr-like resignation, her brother
put down his coffee-cup and came out on the verandah.