nine in the morning
Neither Mrs. Trevor nor her bosom-friend Mrs. Baird , the regimental surgeon 's better half , ever attempted it ; but they invariably attended and sat together , usually talking scandal of Mrs. Norton as she played or chatted with the men . Mrs. Trevor 's chief grievance against her was that the General Commanding the Division , when he came to inspect the battalion , took the younger woman in to dinner , for , as her husband the Resident was the Viceroy 's representative , she could claim precedence over the wife of a mere regimental commandant . No English village is so full of petty squabbles and malicious gossip as a small Indian station . Like everyone else in the land Wargrave hated most those terrible hours of the hot weather between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon . He and Raymond passed them , like so many thousands of their kind elsewhere , shut up in their comfortless bungalow , which was darkened and closely shuttered to exclude the awful heat and the blinding glare outside . Too hot to read or write , almost to smoke , they lay in long cane chairs , gasping and perspiring freely , while the whining _ punkah _ overhead barely stirred the heated air . One exterior window on the windward side of the bungalow was filled with a thick mat of dried and odorous _ kuskus _ grass , against which every quarter of an hour the _ bheestie _ threw water to wet it thoroughly so that the hot breeze that swept over the burning sand outside might enter cooled by the evaporation of the water .