"Poor, dear Dick!" remarked Mrs. Stuart in her high complaining voice. "He always had a violent temper, even as a baby. Don't fret about it, my dear,"--for large tears were slowly rolling down Belle's cheeks--"He will be all right to-morrow, you'll see; and he has really been steadiness itself of late." "He wasn't anything to speak of either," urged Mildred with her usual good-nature. "Only a little bit on, and I expect he had no dinner." "Dinner or no dinner, I say he was drunk," growled Colonel Stuart sulkily. "No one lies like that unless he is,--that's my experience." But Belle scarcely realised what they said. Her heart was full of fear, and though sleep came with almost unwelcome readiness to drive thought away, she dreamt all night long that some one was saying, "One kind word, Belle, only one kind word," and she could not speak. CHAPTER V. Outside the parallelograms of white roads centred by brown stretches of stubbly grass, and bordered by red and blue houses wherein the European residents of Faizapore dwelt after their kind, and our poor Belle lay dreaming, a very different world had been going on its way placidly indifferent, not to her only, but to the whole colony of strangers within its gates. The great plains, sweeping like a sea to the horizon, had been ploughed, sown, watered, harvested: children had been born, strong men had died, crimes been committed, noble acts done; and of all this not one word had reached the alien ears. Only the District Officer and his subaltern, John Raby, bridged the gulf by driving down every day to the court-house, which lay just beyond the boundaries of the cantonment and close to the native city; there, for eight weary hours, to come in contact with the most ignoble attributes of the Indian, and thence to drive at evening heartily glad of escape. In the lines of the native regiment Philip Marsden went in and out among his men, knowing them by name, and sympathising with their lives. But they too were a race apart from the tillers of soil, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, who pay the bills for the great Empire.