"Yes; two new fellows came up this week. A doctor from Mooltan and a Gunner from 'Dera Dismal,'—the Thibet man,—Lenox, who seems to be making a reputation of sorts. But he looks a wreck. Smokes like a chimney; and is apparently working himself to death; a thankless form of folly."
"Perhaps. Yet India needs a few unsparing workers—like Captain Lenox."
She spoke with studied indifference; but her fingers were busy uprooting a patch of moss.
"Oh yes, India has a healthy appetite for unsparing workers! She is a grasping harridan, who demands all and offers nothing. She devours the lives of men who are foolish enough to lose their hearts to her, and wrecks their bodies by way of thanks."
Quita's lips lifted in the merest shadow of a smile. "Aren't you a little ungrateful to her? She has been fairly merciful to you!"
"I have never given her the ghost of a chance to be otherwise! I don't believe in overwork, plus the Indian climate. More men kill themselves by a happy mixture of both than the importance of their achievements justifies. I was chaffing Lenox only last night about his leaning towards that unrecognised form of suicide; and all the answer I got was that a man might die of a more degrading disease. You never by any chance get a rise out of old Lenox!"
"Do you know him well?"
"As well as it's possible to know a fellow who lives with all his shutters up. And in any case an anchorite, and a woman-hater, would never be much in my line. The symptoms appear to have developed in the last few years. Not without reason, as I happen to know."
"What do you happen to know?"
The question came almost in a whisper; but Garth, who had all a woman's weakness for other people's affairs, was too intent upon his ill-gotten scrap of gossip to observe his companion's slight change of manner.