The memory of it rejoiced him throughout the terrible hours of the long journey in the baking heat and blinding glare of the Hot Weather day. The worse moments were the stops every ten miles to change ponies, when he had to wait in the blazing sunshine. His "boy," who sat on the front seat of the vehicle beside the driver, produced from a basket packed with wet straw cooled bottles of soda-water, without which Wargrave felt that he would have died of sunstroke. Then on after each halt; and the endless strip of white road again unrolled before him, while the never-ceasing clank of the iron-shod bar coupling the ponies maddened his aching head with its monotonous rhythm. As the weary miles slid past him his thoughts were with Violet, so beautiful, so patient and brave in her self-denying endurance. And he cursed himself for having added to her pain, and inwardly vowed that some day he would atone to her for it. At last the _tonga_ rattled into the bare compound of the Basedi dâk-bungalow standing on a high stone plinth. The untidy _khansamah_--the custodian of the rest-home--hurried on to the verandah to greet the unexpected visitor and show his "boy" where to put the sahib's bedding and baggage in a bleak room with a cane-bottomed wooden bed hung with torn mosquito-curtains. From a glass case in the sitting-room containing a scanty store of canned provisions the _khansamah_ provided a meal with such ill-assorted ingredients as Somebody's desiccated soup lukewarm, a tin of sardines and sweet biscuits to eat with them, and a bottle of beer to wash it down with. Wargrave was too choked with dust, too sickened with the heat and glare, to have any appetite. After a smoke he dragged his weary body to bed and in spite of the mosquitoes that flocked joyously through the holes in the gauze curtains to feast on him slept the profound sleep of utter exhaustion. He was up at daybreak; for the tide served in the early morning and only at its height could the launch approach the shore, which at low water was bordered with the filthy slime of mangrove swamps.