As the days went by the power of the gay life of the Hills to satisfy her grew less, while the ache in her heart for her absent friend increased. If only she could hear from him she thought she could bear the separation better. From her brother she learned by chance that he was alone in Ranga Duar, the only news that she had had of him for a long time. The Rains had burst, and she pictured the loneliness of the one European in the solitary outpost, cut off from his kind, with no one of his race to speak to, deprived of the most ordinary requirements, necessities, of civilisation, without a doctor within hundreds of miles. At that thought her heart seemed to stop beating. Without a doctor! He might be ill, dying, for all she knew, with no one of his colour to tend him, no loving hand to hold a cup to his fevered lips. Even in the short time that she had been in India she had heard of many tragedies of isolation, of sick and lonely Englishmen with none but ignorant, careless native servants to look after them in their illness, no doctor to alleviate their sufferings, until pain and delirium drove them to look for relief and oblivion down the barrel of a too-ready pistol. Thus the girl tortured herself, as a loving woman will do, by imagining all the most terrible things happening to the man of her heart. She feared no longer the perils of the forest for him. She felt that he was master of man or beast in it. But fever lays low the strongest. It might be that while she was dancing he was lying ill, dying, perhaps dead. And she would not know. The dreadful idea occurred to her after her return from a ball at which she had been universally admired and much sought after. But, as she sat wrapped in her blue silk dressing-gown, her feet thrust into satin slippers of the same colour, her pretty hair about her shoulders, instead of recalling the triumphs of the evening, the compliments of her partners, and the unspoken envy of other girls, her thoughts flew to one solitary man in a little bungalow, cloud-enfolded and comfortless, in a lonely outpost. The sudden dread of his being ill chilled her blood and so terrified her that, if the hour had not made it impossible, she would have gone out at once and telegraphed to him to ask if all were well. Yet the next instant her face grew scarlet at the thought. She sat for a long time motionless, thinking hard. Then the idea occurred to her of writing to him, writing a chatty, almost impersonal letter, such as one friend could send to another without fear of her motives being misunderstood. She had too high an opinion of Dermot to think that he would deem her forward, yet it cost her much to be the first to write. But her anxiety conquered pride. And she wrote the letter that Dermot read in his bungalow in Ranga Duar while the storm shook the hills.