had gone away and left me. There was no help for it. I must face things alone.
Now this may not seem to you such a dreadful contingency as it was to me. Nobody would ever guess from knowing me by day how horribly nervous I am at night. I'm quite brave and ready to face anything in the daytime. Then you can see what's happening, and you do know just where you are. It's the thought of something rushing on you suddenly in the dark when you're alone and can't see what's going on that sort of paralyses me. It's not a feeling that I always have every night. I go on quite happily for a long time. Then I suddenly think about it, and it's all up. I had it that night very badly, and I begin to think now that it must have been presentiment as much as anything besides.
First of all I went carefully round locking every door. Perhaps I should explain that in India a door and a window are generally synonymous terms. You get what we call full-length French windows, generally a glass-door inside with outside venetians—shutters or jhilmils, as they call them out in India. I contented myself with bolting the jhilmils sometimes, though I had horrible doubts as to whether it might not be possible by carefully inserting one's hand to open them from the outside. But when I came to the eighteenth door I found to my horror that it had no inside glass window and no bolt at all on the jhilmil! And it was one of those that looked straight out towards the dâk bungalow across the compound—you always in India call
