Hill stations have much to answer for in the frequency of domestic trouble in Anglo-Indian society. In the old days before they existed, and passages to England were long and costly, the wives stayed by their husbands' side for weal or woe. What the latter could endure their spouses were not afraid of. Now, at the first signs of the approach of the hot weather, the married ladies, as well as the maidens, fly to the Hills. In Darjeeling I met many who said they had not seen their husbands for eight months--and yet I found them in October booking their rooms in the hotels for the following March. Naturally this separation does not tend to the continuance of conjugal love. And there is a still greater danger. A married woman arriving from the Plains to take up her residence in a hotel probably finds no other woman in it whom she has known before. Among the guests there is sure to be a preponderance of her own sex; and though many ladies may call on her, they will probably be too much engrossed in their own concerns to give her much of their society. She sits by herself at table at meals and spends most of her time alone in her own room. Then some bachelor on leave, and staying perhaps at the same hotel, makes her acquaintance. He finds her pleasant and attractive, offers to join her in her solitary rides and walks, comes in often to chat with her in her private sitting-room, takes her to the many dances, and, as men are scarcer at them than in the ball-rooms of the Plains, engages half her programme and escorts her back to their hotel afterwards. Even from sheer loneliness she accepts his attentions and allows him to drop into the acknowledged position of her _cavaliere servente_. Two or three months of this daily, hourly companionship and--well, another Hill scandal is caused. The man who brings a pretty wife to India is brave; the one who sends her away from him for six or eight months in the year is, to say the least of it, unwise. It is not fair to her to expose her thus to temptation. Far be it from me to assert that every Hill grass-widow forgets her absent husband. But many do; and all the blame should not rest on them. The careful commanding officer of a regiment discourages his young subalterns from taking leave to Hill Stations. He knows that in such places mischief is too often found for idle hands. He urges them rather to go shooting in the jungles or in Kashmir. And certainly this latter is a better way for the youngster to spend his holiday than loafing about a Hill Station. Despite the novelty of the life in Darjeeling and its social gaieties I did not repine when my time came to quit it; and my heart rejoiced as I got out of the train at Buxa Road, mounted the elephant awaiting me, and rode through the silent forest towards my lonely hills. CHAPTER XIV A JUNGLE FORT