midnight
Therefore her face was white as bone , and in the centre of her forehead was a big silvery scar about the size of a shilling - the mark of a Delhi sore , which is the same as a `` Bagdad date . '' This comes from drinking bad water , and slowly eats into the flesh till it is ripe enough to be burned out . None the less William had enjoyed herself hugely in her four years . Twice she had been nearly drowned while fording a river ; once she had been run away with on a camel ; had witnessed a midnight attack of thieves on her brother 's camp ; had seen justice administered , with long sticks , in the open under trees ; could speak Urdu and even rough Punjabi with a fluency that was envied by her seniors ; had entirely fallen out of the habit of writing to her aunts in England , or cutting the pages of the English magazines ; had been through a very bad cholera year , seeing sights unfit to be told ; and had wound up her experiences by six weeks of typhoid fever , during which her head had been shaved and hoped to keep her twenty-third birthday that September . It is conceivable that the aunts would not have approved of a girl who never set foot on the ground if a horse were within hail ; who rode to dances with a shawl thrown over her skirt ; who wore her hair cropped and curling all over her head ; who answered indifferently to the name of William or Bill ; whose speech was heavy with the flowers of the vernacular ; who could act in amateur theatricals , play on the banjo , rule eight servants and two horses , their accounts and their diseases , and look men slowly and deliberately between the eyes - even after they had proposed to her and been rejected . `` I like men who do things , '' she had confided to a man in the Educational Department , who was teaching the sons of cloth-merchants and dyers the beauty of Wordsworth 's `` Excursion in annotated cram-books ; and when he grew poetical , William explained that she `` did n't understand poetry very much ; it made her head ache , '' and another broken heart took refuge at the Club . But it was all William 's fault .