These were her mother and Dominga. Since Dominga's elopement had been so successfully frustrated, she had fallen into a state of lassitude and lay for hours motionless, and, so to speak, torpid, coiled up with closed eyes in her long cane chair. When the all too terrible sun had sunk below the plains across the river, and the soft blue haze of an Indian evening had taken its place, she would wander alone about the untidy garden, muttering to herself incessantly (as if rehearsing some important conversation). She still wrote many letters; these the Dak runner now no longer carried fearfully through the high elephant grass, or the thorny Dak bushes of the Terai, but they travelled in full state on His Majesty's mail tonga, and were delivered by a postman in orthodox uniform at a certain hill club. The hot weather had seemingly the power of relaxing the stiff social bonds peculiar to the cool season. Most women cast aside curling pins and corsets and wore muslin wrappers, and their hair "plain." Men abandoned formality with waistcoats and collars, and Mr. Lepell frequently walked over to smoke a pipe with his sub-manager. On these occasions Mrs. Chandos never appeared; she was incessantly occupied with business, and besides this, Tom Lepell was one of the two men in the whole world whom she not only hated but feared. Mrs. Cavalho constantly trotted across to sit and gossip with Mrs. Lopez on a little plot of scorched grass in the garden; here, under the stars which shone between the bare branches of the cork trees, the two old women talked for hours; talked of their youth and their good days, before they had become a pair of derelicts moored beside the Jurra river. Pussy and Verona occasionally joined them, and listened with unaffected interest to tales of visions, and warnings, of life, love and death, and many other curious matters. In the dim, soft light Mistress Cavalho's old face seemed to assume a different expression--perhaps Youth himself came to her in the dusk, along with his tender recollections? Her eyes looked large and brilliant, the lines of her features appeared faultless. She had a low, sweet voice, and there was something in the personality of Felipa Cavalho that was inexpressibly soothing and restful.