"Oh, I should never have come to that," he replied with unexpected decision. "Angel will be in England, if not with you, with others; and with six thousand miles of sea and land between us, surely we can dispense with a chaperon."
In due time Captain Gascoigne returned to the East, via America and Japan, and Angel passed into the hands of her grandmother. She grew up and left school with sincere regret, and many injunctions from Miss Morton, who deplored the departure of her favourite pupil, and contemplated her future with considerable apprehension. She had heard of Lady Augusta Gascoigne as a lively, worldly matron, fond of cards, racing, and racketing. What a guide and counsellor for a girl of eighteen!
"Miss Angel Gascoigne—by her grandmother, Lady Augusta Gascoigne," was a notification in a Morning Post, succeeding a March Drawing Room, and the "imp" was launched. She came out and enjoyed her first season, and was warmly welcomed in a set in which the only disqualification was a failure to be smart!
Angel was not the least afraid of granny, whom she alternately amazed, amused, delighted, and defied. She reversed the situation of aunt and niece, and was Eva's steady support, confidante, adviser, and idol. She made the house gay with her songs, her light laugh, her flitting foot, her radiant young personality. Her cousins and aunts were electrified when they first met "Miss Gascoigne;" her aunt was almost always "Poor Miss Eva." Their attempts at patronage were easily disposed of; the quick wit and cool self-possession of the Angel of Ramghur combined with the grace and aplomb of the Angel of Hill Street was more than a match for the Harchesters and Lorraine girls. Seeing that she refused to pose as a mere nobody and a poor relation, they changed their point of view and became her sworn allies, admirers, and friends. Immediately after the London season Lady Augusta and her family left Hill Street for Aix-les-Bains.
During the time when Angel had been growing up and blooming into a beautiful and somewhat despotic girl, her guardian and cousin had developed into an enthusiastic worker, a would-be Empire builder. At first, his duty had been among the canals and the distribution of the water supply; he had to see that every village received its due share of water; in the slack season he had to superintend works of construction and repair. He had no society, and no amusements. These years of solitude had a certain effect on his character. He spent his time marching from one canal to another, accumulating stores of experience regarding the conditions under which the peasants lived; his work was tedious and monotonous, but Gascoigne was a young man of active habits and observant eye; he was never dull, and his character was setting into the solitary mould. His manners were a little stern. His feelings were under iron control, but he was always tender to animals and suffering. From the canals Gascoigne was promoted to the frontier, thanks to a little war. Here he had distinguished himself so brilliantly that he was decorated, and wrote D.S.O. after his name. He enjoyed the hardships; the keen, exciting existence, the smell of powder, the chances of life and death, stirred his pulses. Indeed, once or twice he and death had met face to face; but he kept these encounters to himself, and they were only talked about in the men's tents, or a word was dropped in the messroom. He never got into the papers—and yet he was known by hundreds as "Sangar" Gascoigne.
It happened when the night had closed in rain, and rolling clouds blotted out the camp lights, that he and a handful had gone back in the dark to look up some stragglers, and had beaten off the wolfish Afghans, and stood by their wounded till dawn and relief. It was an experience to turn a man's hair white and it turned one man's brain. Let those who know what night brings to the wounded and "cut off" testify if their fears were not well founded?
The hardships, the horrors, the honours, of a short but fierce campaign had left their marks on Philip; this and the two years' solitary canal duty had changed him, perhaps, even more in the same period than his pretty cousin Angela.
He was again in the North-West Provinces, responsible for a great district, and well worthy of responsibility, though but thirty-seven years of age. He was self-reliant, able, and energetic, and if reserved and given to sarcasm, Gascoigne was popular, being generous and hospitable to a fault. His bungalow was well appointed; all that it wanted was a mistress (so said the ladies of the station). But Philip Gascoigne's thoughts did not lean towards matrimony; his tastes were solitary and simple; when away on duty or on the frontier, no one lived a harder or more frugal life. He was well inured to the Indian climate, master of several tongues; he had a capital head for ideas, a mathematical mind; his heart was in his work, his profession was his idol. Work with him amounted to a passion, and had effectually chased love from his thoughts. He was one of the men whom luxury and decadence had left untouched, and upon whom the executive business of the Empire, in its remoter parts, could depend. Gascoigne was so good-looking, cheery, popular, and eligible that many women spread their nets in the sight of that rara avis, an agreeable, invulnerable bachelor. Over a series of years he had successfully eluded every effort to "catch him," and kept all would-be mothers-in-law politely at a distance.