In the evenings they generally rode or played tennis. The courts were cut out of the wooded hill-sides; and the kites and the great yellow-headed eagles came and looked on from the blue sky above; and if you hit a ball over the wire-netting it probably went down five or six hundred feet through the trees. Then there were the merry gymkhánas at Annandale, a grassy basin among the pines. All Simla used to gather there one afternoon a week, and the jhampáns and dandies were put down on the bank by the cricket pavilion; and there was pony-racing and tent-pegging, and tilting at the ring for the ladies, and all sorts of sport. At sunset it ended, and the crowd went streaming up through the darkening woods to the Mall. There was some good music to be heard too, and there was the little theatre; and altogether, people managed to amuse themselves very well indeed.

Behind all the fun was a great quantity of solid work. Many scores of men who were on duty in Simla, filling the various Government offices civil and military, were, as a rule, not only hard worked but overworked. They began early in the morning and ended late, and had little time for amusement. But there were plenty of idle men on leave, and the fiddling and dancing went merrily on; and the district officers down in the burning plains, and the perspiring merchants in Calcutta and Bombay, imagined that the fiddling and dancing were the whole thing.

As to the people one met, Helen and Guy came to the conclusion that they were very much like their countrymen elsewhere, which, on the whole, was not surprising.

Mrs. Stewart of the Thirtieth, who was fond of an epigram, said the Simla ladies were all either rowdy or dowdy; but, in fact, the rowdy element was very small indeed. In a society consisting of a few hundred people crowded upon a hill-top, where every one knows every one else, the fast set makes a great noise for its size; but the large majority of the ladies were sensible, well-bred Englishwomen of the usual type. The men were mostly soldiers, and almost all professional men who knew their business. Their conversation was apt to be a little shoppy; but, taking them all round, the average of gentlemanly feeling and intellectual culture was, at least, as high as among the professional classes in England. Being Englishmen, they had, of course, snobs among them, in high positions and in low, and the way of these snobs was to sneer at everything Indian; but such

vulgarity was unusual. True snobbishness does not flourish out of England; it droops and dies in the opener air of Greater Britain.

Altogether, though it had its drawbacks, Simla was by no means a disagreeable place of exile, and so Guy Langley and his wife speedily concluded.

CHAPTER XXX

A SIMLA DINNER-PARTY

The Gov

Their skies

THE dry weather was over and the rains had set in. ernment of India was not depressed by the change. were clear. The campaign in Afghanistan had been short, and thoroughly successful. The old Amir was dead; and the new Amir had seen the folly of further resistance. He had signed a treaty, giving us all we wanted. An English resident was about to be established in Kabul, and the Russian Mission had disappeared into the desert. Our influence in Afghanistan was predominant. The star of England was bright in the Central Asian sky, and the star of Russia looked faint and pale. It had only needed a little boldness. Lord Lytton had stepped forward and struck one determined blow, and all was over. Was this the bugbear that had frightened us for so many years? The Forward school were triumphant. Here and there a man who knew the Afghans, or had read the history of our empire in the East, said, 'Wait; we're only beginning.' But the majority scoffed. They had had enough of masterly inactivity. Difficulties, like Afghans,

disappeared if one tackled them boldly. Five hundred men and a couple of mountain guns, properly handled, could go anywhere in Asia; and for the future we were not going to be afraid of anything or anybody. If the Russians ever troubled us again, then Vive la guerre; à Tashkent !

Still it was raining heavily. Day after day the great gray clouds came rolling through the gap by Tara Devi, or over the ridge from the north, and filled the valleys and swallowed up the hill-tops. It generally cleared in the evening; and sometimes there were beautiful sunsets, when the snowy range stood out clear and close, above a foreground of wooded hills and deep blue valleys fresh-coloured by the rain; and to the southward one

could see the plains fifty miles away, and the great rivers winding through them; and around the sinking sun the clouds grouped themselves in gorgeous masses of brown and crimson and gold. On the other hand, it sometimes rained persistently from morning till night, and then it was unpleasant.

One Saturday afternoon Guy Langley had come home early from office. Just before lunch-time there had been a break; the rain ceased, and away to the westward there was even a little patch of blue sky; white clouds like carded wool lay in the valleys and rested on the hill-sides; in places they were drifting slowly upwards as if they meant to rise into the sky and disappear. Guy looked out of his wooden verandah and thought it was going to be fine. He would go home to lunch, and they would ride round Jakko in the afternoon. The week had been one of hard work. The horses wanted exercise, and so did he. He asked and received leave to go, and walked home. The roads were very wet; and from the wooden drains brown torrents went roaring down the hill-sides through the pines. The walls and the mossy limbs of the oaks and rhododendrons were green with delicate ferns. They would have a jolly ride. On a fine evening nothing could be pleasanter. There was no dust now and no heat-haze; and the view away to the snowy range, over the deep blue khuds and the great jagged Shali peaks, was always lovely. They would have a spin down the straight bit at the back, from Sinjowlee village to the convent. His Waler always shied a little at the end, where the road sounded hollow under the black rock. What an awful smash it would be if he ever went over the stone wall there; they might go down hundreds of feet. You could get another good long canter from Chota Simla to the corner by Oakover. That was the best way round Jakko, from north to south. There was very little of the road where you had to walk; the downhill part was short.

Guy reached home without rain, and was received with acclamations. 'Oh, I am so glad!' Helen said. 'I was beginning to be afraid you had not been able to get away. I'm longing for a ride, and Sultan was so fresh last time that I could hardly hold him.'

But as they sat at lunch it grew darker, and a gray veil came across the window. Only a cloud drifting up the hill-side,' Guy said.

Then it began to rain, harder and harder, until they could hardly hear each other speak for the noise on the wooden roof.

T

'Confound the rain. What a nuisance it is! I can't see what I'm eating. It's as bad as a London fog.'

6 Never mind. in the afternoon.'

We've got plenty of time.

It is sure to clear

It did not clear in the afternoon. On the contrary, the clouds settled down more and more heavily, and the sky became one uniform dull gray without a sign of light anywhere, and the gravel outside the porch became a pool.

About four o'clock, having smoked a cigar in the verandah and read the Pioneer down to the last advertisement, Guy began to get thoroughly bored. What is more disgusting than a wet afternoon after a hearty lunch and a smoke, when one has arranged to go out and cannot settle down to anything? Helen had left him to his paper, and had gone indoors to write letters. He called to her, and she came out with Rex through the drawing-room window.

'What is it, darling?'

'Isn't this beastly? The only afternoon I can get too. We might have had such a jolly ride.'

'It is very disappointing, but it may clear yet. Only it will have to be quick. We must get in again by half-past six.'

'Why? we're not dining out?'

'Yes; don't you remember?-with the Ashtons. And it will take me nearly an hour from here. It's right at the very top of that dreadful hill.'

'O Lord! that licks everything. It's sure to rain the whole way there and back; and I can't stand that woman. She thinks a major-general is a sort of little god, and patronises one in the most disgusting way.'

'I don't think she means it really, and you won't see much of her.'

'I hope not. What a cursed nuisance it is!'

Helen examined the sky. 'I really think it is a little lighter now,' she said. 'I will go and get my habit on, and if it does clear we can have a cup of tea and set off at once. I will tell them to get the horses ready.'

'All right.'

Then Guy proceeded to make himself thoroughly miserable by setting his heart upon the rain stopping in time to let him have his ride. What children we are! There is only one thing, working against time, that tries one more than waiting against time.

Guy sat gazing at the sky, and smoking, and looking at his