The veranda where he sat was broad and deep, and two doors opened into it from the bungalow. One led into his own quarters, the other into those of his brother officer, Percy Oldham. He was away on leave up in the hills, but was expected back to-night, and Case knew that, before either of them slept, there would have to be talk of some kind between them. A year ago, when they had taken this bungalow together, they had been inseparable friends, so that the mess had found for them the nicknames of David and Jonathan; then, by degrees, growing impalpable friction of various kinds had estranged them, and to-night, when at length Case thought of Oldham, his mouth went dry with the intensity of his hate. And at the thought of him, his mind, hovering and circling so long, dropped like a stooping hawk into the storm-centre of his misery. He took from the table the letter he had found waiting for him in the rack at the mess-room that evening, and by the light of the fly-beleaguered lamp read it through again. It was quite short. “DEAR CASE,--I shall get back late on Thursday night, and before we meet I think I had better tell you that I am engaged to Kitty Metcalf. I suppose we shall have to talk about it, though it might be better if we did not. For a man who is so happy, I am awfully sorry; that is all I can say about it. She wished me to tell you, though, of course, I should have done so in any case.--Yours truly, “PERCY OLDHAM.” Case read this through for the sixth or seventh time, then tore it into fragments, and again replenished his glass. It was barely six months ago that he had been engaged to this girl himself; then they had quarrelled, and the match had been broken off. But he found now that he had never ceased to hope that when he went up himself, later in the summer, to the hills, it would be renewed again. And at the thought his present discomfort, his debts, all that had occupied his mind before, were wiped clean from it. Oldham--they had talked of it fifty times--was to have been his best man. Suddenly, out of the black bosom of the windless night, there came a sigh of hot air rustling the shrubs outside. It came into the veranda where he sat, like the stir of some corporeal presence, making the light of his lamp to hang flickering in the chimney for a moment, and then expire in a wreath of sour-smelling smoke. One of his dogs sat up for a moment growling, and then all was utterly still again. The arch of clear sky to the east had dwindled and become overcast, and the red moon showed but a faint blur of light behind the gathering clouds.