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Early on the following Monday morning Wargrave, dressed in khaki knickerbockers, shirt and puttees, and wearing besides his pith helmet a "spine protector" a quilted cloth pad buttoned to the back as a guard against sunstroke, went down to the Dermots' bungalow.
Half-way up the road to the Mess Wargrave looked back and saw an elephant heave into sight around a bend below the Dermots' house and plod heavily up to their gate. On the charjama the passenger-carrying contrivance of wooden seats on the pad with footboards hanging by short ropes sat a lady and two European men holding white umbrellas up to keep off the vertical rays of the noonday sun.
His first excursion into the jungle was arranged at dinner at the Dermots' house on his second evening in Ranga Duar. The Colonel proposed to take him out on the following Monday, for on the next day the Deb Zimpun would arrive.
Punctually at the time named Wargrave reached the Dermots' bungalow, on the road outside which, a Guard of Honour of fifty sepoys under an Indian officer was drawn up. Passing along the verandah he entered the office and saluted the Colonel who, seated at his desk, looked up and nodded for him to be seated and then returned to the despatch that he was writing.
Alone among the Irish parliaments of that age, this parliament was filled with Dermots and Geohagans, O'Neils and O'Donovans, Macmahons, Macnamaras, and Macgillicuddies. The lead was taken by a few men whose abilities had been improved by the study of the law, or by experience acquired in foreign countries.
As he laid his face on his arm to shut out the light where he sat at the table he felt that he was nearer to loving the absent woman than he had ever been. For the vision of the Dermots' married happiness, of the deep affection linking husband and wife, of the children climbing the stair and smiling back at their parents, came vividly to him.
Their only European neighbours were the planters on tea-gardens scattered about in the great forest below, the nearest thirty miles off. The few visitors that Ranga Duar saw in the year were the General on his annual inspection, an occasional official of the Indian Civil Service, the Public Works or the Forest Department, or some planter friend of the Dermots.
Next afternoon the subaltern, passing down the road, was hailed from the Dermots' garden by an imperious small lady with golden curls and big blue bows and ordered to play with her. Her brother and Badshah had to join in the game, too. Frank, chasing the dainty mite round and round the elephant, began to think himself in the Garden of Eden.
"It's time to go home now." They escorted her to the Dermots' bungalow, where the doctor lingered for a few more minutes in her society, while Wargrave climbed up to the Mess and went to look at the panther's skin pegged out on the ground under a thick coating of ashes and now as hard as a board after a day's exposure to the burning sun.
When Wargrave reached Ranga Duar the little outpost seemed strangely forlorn without the Dermots and their children. Major Hunt and Macdonald welcomed him warmly.
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