Her own People by B. M. Croker

Were she to live to the age of one hundred years Verona could never forget that hot weather at Manora -- the memory was burnt into her very soul. It was not merely the absolute desolation of the season, not only the breathless atmosphere that seemed to quench all vitality, the endless hours spent in idleness, because the rooms were necessarily darkened, it was not the maddening "Tonk Tonk" of the coppersmith bird, the thoughts of her past, the hopelessness of her future, but every other sensation was dominated by the fact that under the same roof, in that still, dim bungalow, abode two malignant spirits, whose every glance and word breathed invincible hatred and ill will.

These were her mother and Dominga. Since Dominga's elopement had been so successfully frustrated, she had fallen into a state of lassitude and lay for hours motionless, and, so to speak, torpid, coiled up with closed eyes in her long cane chair. When the all too terrible sun had sunk below the plains across the river, and the soft blue haze of an Indian evening had taken its place, she would wander alone about the untidy garden, muttering to herself incessantly (as if rehearsing some important conversation). She still wrote many letters; these the Dak runner now no longer carried fearfully through the high elephant grass, or the thorny Dak bushes of the Terai, but they travelled in full state on His Majesty's mail tonga, and were delivered by a postman in orthodox uniform at a certain hill club. The hot weather had seemingly the power of relaxing the stiff social bonds peculiar to the cool season. Most women cast aside curling pins and corsets and wore muslin wrappers, and their hair "plain. " Men abandoned formality with waistcoats and collars, and Mr. Lepell frequently walked over to smoke a pipe with his sub-manager. On these occasions Mrs. Chandos never appeared; she was incessantly occupied with business, and besides this, Tom Lepell was one of the two men in the whole world whom she not only hated but feared.