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“You’ll be in clover here,” he said. “The heat in the tents is like nothing on earth. The Chief is a perfect salamander; but your brother, Miss Ross, has been living under his table with a wet quilt over it, and I have scooped out a burrow for myself in the ground under my tent. Porter” (the Engineer officer already mentioned) “makes his boy pour water over him every night when he goes to bed, so as to get an hour or so of coolness. By the bye, Elma, the Chief and Ross and Tarleton are coming to dine with us to-night.”

“Dugald!” cried Lady Haigh, in justifiable indignation. “That man will be the death of me! To dine, when there is no time to get any food, and the servants haven’t come up, and there isn’t any furniture!”

“Well, perhaps I ought to say that we are to dine with him up here. He provides the food, and we are to have it in the durbar-room over there. It’s a sort of festivity to celebrate your coming up. He really means it well, you know.”

Lady Haigh was perceptibly mollified, but she took time to thaw.