Too weary to get out of uniform, Lenox laid aside his helmet and accoutrements; shouted to the punkah coolie, sleeping in the verandah, chin on chest; sorted his geographical papers, and sat down to the table. Then he took out his pipe, eyed it thoughtfully, and flung it aside with a curse. Each relapse resulted in a renewed access of self-distrust; and this morning the cloud upon his spirit fell heavier than ever, because he foresaw that if the work ahead of him were to be pulled through, in the teeth of the grinding headaches consequent on his fall, last night's programme must be repeated, not once, but many times, And at that rate, what was to be the end of it? The degradation of submitting to the drug itself? A thousand times, no. The soldier in him sprang to arms at the mere suggestion. Like all men capable of greatness, he believed, not in the mastery of circumstance, but in the mastery of will. Yet, unhappily, the will, like all spiritual forces, is ignominiously dependent on bodily conditions. Pain, sheer pitiless pain, will have its way with the bravest of us. The man was ill without realising it. The nerves in his head throbbed to a devil's hornpipe of their own, and mental effort was beyond him. In vain he contracted his heavy brows, and tried to gather up the threads of the chapter he had been working at. Black depression overpowered him, obliterating rational thought. The morning's service haunted him with unnatural persistence, and the half-hour he had spent with Dick in the dead boy's bungalow, looking through his papers--a chaos of bills, mostly unpaid; racing notes; old programmes; and half a dozen envelopes addressed in a girl's unformed hand. On the open blotter, an unfinished letter to a friend in Simla had announced his hope of a speedy exchange down country! his determination not to spend another hot weather 'on this God-forsaken Frontier . . .' "Poor misguided chap," Lenox mused, not without a tinge of his old contempt. "Now if only _I_ could have gone in his place, it would have simplified matters all round." But he thrust away the thought as morbid and cowardly; and by way of curative drew Quita's last letter out of his breast-pocket. The fact of her love for him still remained a miracle incompletely realised; and she had been right in her belief that he had yet to discover its intensity and depth.