A wing of the Residency had been turned into mess and ante-rooms, and furnished the Commissioner with quarters. Clones, the doctor, found lodging in another part of it, while Terrington, Walcot and Dore, his immediate subordinates, and Langford, who commanded the Sikh and Dogra detachments, made shift in an adjoining bungalow, and the native officers were sheltered by the Fort.
It was still early when Terrington, already half through his morning's work, entered the mess-room; but only Mrs. Chantry remained beside the urn. She wore a brown canvas habit, a hard straw hat, with the colours, scarlet and sage, of her husband's regiment. She looked to him absurdly young and pretty for a woman in such a place; and he was provoked by the folly which permitted her to arrive there. She was trying to look disdainfully indifferent. She was proud of being the one Englishwoman in that utmost post of the Empire, and this man alone had appeared absolutely unconscious of her presence.
"I suppose you're Captain Terrington," she said, turning towards him from the table; "as I was introduced yesterday to all the others?"
"Yes," he smiled, "I'm Nevile Terrington: and it needs no supposing to give a name to you."
"Really?" she said, reseating herself. "I shouldn't have imagined you were aware of my existence."
"All too well!" he sighed, smiling. "There is nothing I would have sooner missed in Sar."
She snapped back the tap of the samovar, and faced him in a pretty little blaze of petulance across the open teapot.
"You would turn me out now if you could, I dare say," she cried.
"This very hour," he assured her, his smile unruffled. "But I can't. 'Rien ne va plus,' as they say at another game. Do you know what that means?"
"At Monte Carlo?"