Devil's Wind by Patricia Wentworth

with a disapproving eye on Adela’s soft, steady colour. “Either pale, or blushing. But there, I always did say that Adela had no heart.”
    â€œHelen is pale enough,” said Hetty Lavington.
    â€œHelen is always pale,” returned Mrs. Middleton with severity. “It is perfectly absurd for a healthy girl to have so little colour. However, there is one thing, India cannot possibly make her any paler, whereas Adela will probably lose her complexion entirely within a year. Good gracious me, Lucy will require a second pocket-handkerchief if she is going to cry like that all through the service. I hope Helen has seen that she is provided.”
    After a brief honeymoon, Captain and Mrs. Morton sailed for India, and Helen Wilmot went with them, poor papa having managed at last to send the money for her passage.
    Azimullah Khan and Mr. Francis Manners were also on their way to the East, at a not very much later date, but they halted for a while in Constantinople, where they acquired an exhaustive knowledge of the current rumours as to British reverses and British incompetence in the Crimea. And if some of the rumours were exaggerated, others, it is to be feared, were only too true. By the time Azimullah brought his master the account of an unsuccessful mission, he could bring him also flattering hopes of such decay of the British power as should one day place the Peishwa’s representative upon the Peishwa’s throne, and meanwhile there was pleasure enough.
    An Oriental prince may be vicious at his will. There are none to check, and many to pander to him.
    Dhundoo Punth’s vices became a byword amongst his own people. He drank deeply. Francis Manners drank with him, and when his unstrung nerves played him false, he drugged them with opium, and followed his uncle deeper and deeper into the morass of vice.
    Captain and Mrs. Morton reached Peshawur at the barest and ugliest time of the year. It was quite cold too, and Adela wrote pettishly to Helen Wilmot at Mian Mir:
    â€œMy dear Helen: This place is frightful. I can’t think how Richard could have drawn such glowing pictures of it. I would never have come to India if I had known what it was like. And the houses! Tumble-down mud heaps, and you never in your life saw such frumps and frights as all the women are. I shall make Richard sell out.”
    Richard laughed consumedly when his wife repeated her remarks to him.
    â€œAnd how are we to live, my child?”
    â€œWhy, you have some money,” said Adela, colouring.
    â€œYes, goose, and I have some ambition. You know I told you so before you married me. Come, madam, I didn’t deceive you with false pretences, did I? I told you I was an ambitious devil, and you took him, and now you must make the best of him.”
    â€œRichard, I do wish you wouldn’t.”
    â€œWouldn’t what?”
    â€œUse such language. It’s not nice.” And Adela held up her head and looked so pretty that Richard kissed her, and told her she was a dear little saint, which she quite believed.
    Presently, however, she returned to the charge.
    â€œRichard, how can we live in a house like this? The floor is all soft mud, under that horrid, untidy matting, and the walls are all soft too, and Ayah says thieves sometimes get in by
    just scraping a hole in the wall. Ayah says the people here are dreadful. They are all thieves.”
    â€œWell, my dear, when one pays us a visit, I’ll shoot him for you. Will that do? He shall make his hole in the wall, and as sure as ever his head comes through, I shall shoot, and then we will dig another hole in the nice soft floor, and bury him, and no one will be a penny the wiser.”
    â€œRichard, how horrid! But really that floor—”
    â€œI’ll give you a Persian carpet for a Christmas present. You shall come down into the city and choose it, if you like. Does that make things any better?”
    Adela smiled a little, but her soft