"There, you know it, I suppose, or you’ve heard of it before. No one _knows_ it, until one’s been through it.
"The natives were pretty good on the whole a few months ago and so we stamped it out then. Jove! some of them were sick, though—sicker than the sickest dog you ever saw—. There was one fellow—he was worth saving—and I never worked so hard over a man in my life, except Stewart when he was hurt at the old Station. He died, though. All the while I kept thinking of that time with Stewart, and how you brought him back from death. I’ve never understood that, and I never learned anything like it in my _Materia Médica_. It was kind of uncanny, but it did the work. I wondered if you could have done something for that fellow. I couldn’t. He was a Scotchman, by the way, of the rank and file."
Here the letter stopped. On a fresh sheet was a postscript.
"Just came across this in my desk—two months old. I must have thought I had sent it and didn’t. Guess I’ll let it go though. Now that the immediate cholera scare is over the natives are playing the dickens again with the water—as they always do. It begins to look like trouble. When the spring rains come it’ll play the devil with the Service this time. Well!"
Trevelyan put down the letter. There was an odd fullness in his throat.
He got up and began to walk to and fro. Once he stopped and kicked at the gravel of the drive with his heel. The odd fullness in his throat grew, and it seemed to him as though an invisible force was impelling him to India.
Then he gripped at his self-control, and quieted his throbbing brain by his will. There should be no impetuous passion to lead him wrongly here. He would weigh the risks; he would force himself to think of all it meant—of all the horror of the details—the horrors that were unspeakable, almost unthinkable. He had seen something of them when he was at the Station. Whatever his decision there should be no regrets.
All day he wandered around the place—preoccupied. He did not touch his lunch, and he scarcely touched his dinner.
In the evening he went into the great library and thought it out—alone.
Had the dreams come to this? Was this the answer?
He sat rigid and mute questioning the silence, but the silence gave back no answer.