It did not take Wargrave long to settle down again into the routine of
regimental life and the humdrum existence of a small Indian station. But
he had never before been quartered in so remote and dull a spot as
Rohar. The only distractions it offered besides the shooting and
pigsticking were two tennis afternoons weekly, one at the Residency, the
other at the Mess. Here the dozen or so Europeans, who knew every line
of each other's faces by heart gathered regularly from sheer boredom
whether the game amused them or not. Neither Mrs. Trevor nor her
bosom-friend Mrs. Baird, the regimental surgeon's better half, ever
attempted it; but they invariably attended and sat together, usually
talking scandal of Mrs. Norton as she played or chatted with the men.
Mrs. Trevor's chief grievance against her was that the General
Commanding the Division, when he came to inspect the battalion, took the
younger woman in to dinner, for, as her husband the Resident was the
Viceroy's representative, she could claim precedence over the wife of a
mere regimental commandant. No English village is so full of petty
squabbles and malicious gossip as a small Indian station.

Like everyone else in the land Wargrave hated most those terrible hours
of the hot weather between nine in the morning and five in the
afternoon. He and Raymond passed them, like so many thousands of their
kind elsewhere, shut up in their comfortless bungalow, which was
darkened and closely shuttered to exclude the awful heat and the
blinding glare outside. Too hot to read or write, almost to smoke, they
lay in long cane chairs, gasping and perspiring freely, while the
whining _punkah_ overhead barely stirred the heated air. One exterior
window on the windward side of the bungalow was filled with a thick mat
of dried and odorous _kuskus_ grass, against which every quarter of an
hour the _bheestie_ threw water to wet it thoroughly so that the hot
breeze that swept over the burning sand outside might enter cooled by