"I don't quite know _what_ to think," she remarked with judicial emphasis. "I don't believe anything is a certainty where Major Garth is concerned. But if they are not engaged they _ought_ to be! I don't like that girl, though. She is much too independent for my taste; and engagement or no, she probably lets Major Garth make love to her. He would never have stuck to her for six months otherwise." On the last words Lenox started as it a cold finger-tip had touched his heart. Such a thought had never occurred to him: and he could have murdered, without compunction, the small self-satisfied woman who had lodged the poisoned shaft in his mind. Turning on his heel, he made straight for his tent, where a littered camp-table gave proof that the art of taking a holiday could not be reckoned among his accomplishments. Then he sat down by it and bowed his head upon his hands. To doubt his wife's integrity was rank insult. Yet he knew Garth's evil reputation; knew also that the suggestion would cling to his memory like a limpet, and torture him in the endless hours of wakefulness from which there was now no way of escape. Enforced abstinence from tobacco and stimulants had told severely upon his nerves, appetite, and health; and a foretaste of the sleepless night ahead of him tempted him to regret his hasty destruction of the bottle of chlorodyne, which had not been replaced. Till dusk he worked without intermission; and, as if by a fiendish nicety of calculation, the evening mail-bag,--brought out by runner from Dalhousie,--contained the coveted parcel of tobacco, whose arrival he had alternately craved and dreaded throughout the past ten days. Zyarulla set it before him with manifest satisfaction. "Now will my Sahib taste comfort and peace again," he muttered into the depths of his beard, and having cut the strings of the parcel, discreetly withdrew. For a while Lenox merely grasped his recovered treasure, feasting his soul upon the knowledge that here, within the space of one small cube, lay the promise of sleep, peace of mind, oblivion. Then, with unsteady hands, he opened the tin: took from his pocket a briar of great age and greater virtue; filled it; lighted it; and drew in the first mouthful of aromatic fragrance, with such rapture of refreshment as a man, parched with fever, drains a glass held to his lips. A great peace enfolded him: and no thought of resistance arose to break the enchantment. For the 'mighty and subtle' drug kills with kindness. Coming to a tormented man in the guise of an angel of peace, it lures him, lulls him, and wraps him about with false contentment before plunging him into the pit.