Her small and shapely figure looked to advantage in the well-cut riding
costume of khaki drill that she wore this morning. A cloth habit would
have been too warm for even these early days of an Eastern Bengal hot
weather. She was ready to accompany her brother in his early ride
through the tea-garden (of which he was assistant manager) in the Duars,
as this district of the Terai below the mountains is called. From the
verandah on which they stood they could look over acres of trim and tidy
bushes planted in orderly rows, a strong contrast to the wild disorder
of the big trees and masses of foliage of the forest that lay beyond
them and stretched to and along the foothills of the Himalayas only a
few miles away.
Daleham's father, a retired colonel, has died just as the boy was preparing
to go up for the entrance examination for the Royal Military College at
Sandhurst. To his great grief he was obliged to give up all hope of
becoming a soldier, and, when he left school, entered an office in the
city. Passionately desirous of an open-air and active life he had
afterwards eagerly snatched at an offer of employment by one of the great
tea companies that are dotting the Terai with their plantations and
sweeping away glorious spaces of wild, primeval forest to replace the trees
by orderly rows of tea-bushes and unsightly iron-roofed factories.
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