the Plains on two hundred rupees a month (for he allowed his wife
eight hundred and fifty), and in a silk banian and cotton trousers. It
said that, perhaps, she had not thought of the unwisdom of
allowing her name to be so generally coupled with the Tertium
Quid's; that she was too much of a child to understand the dangers
of that sort of thing; that he, her husband, was the last man in the
world to interfere jealously with her little amusements and
interests, but that it would be better were she to drop the Tertium
Quid quietly and for her husband's sake. The letter was sweetened
with many pretty little pet names, and it amused the Tertium Quid
considerably. He and She laughed over it, so that you, fifty yards
away, could see their shoulders shaking while the horses slouched
along side by side.

Their conversation was not worth reporting. The upshot of it was
that, next day, no one saw the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid
together. They had both gone down to the Cemetery, which, as a
rule, is only visited officially by the inhabitants of Simla.

A Simla funeral with the clergyman riding, the mourners riding,
and the coffin creaking as it swings between the bearers, is one of
the most depressing things on this earth, particularly when the
procession passes under the wet, dank dip beneath the Rockcliffe
Hotel, where the sun is shut out, and all the hill streams are
wailing and weeping together as they go down the valleys.

Occasionally folk tend the graves, but we in India shift and are
transferred so often that, at the end of the second year, the Dead
have no friend only acquaintances who are far too busy amusing
themselves up the hill to attend to old partners. The idea of using a