“How do, colonel? This is Mr Campian—stopping with me. Nearly got shot by some Pathân budmashes, and then drowned by the tangi coming down, on the night he arrived. You may have heard about it.”
“Not a word—not a word. Haven’t seen a soul for weeks. Glad to meet you, Mr Campian. Fine view from here, isn’t there?”
“Splendid,” assented Campian, who had been taking in both the speaker and the view. The former was of the pleasant, genial type of soldier—elderly, grizzled, upright, well-groomed. The latter—well, it was fine—uncommonly so. From its eyrie-like position, the bungalow commanded a vast sweep of mountain and valley. Embedded against a background of juniper slope the front of the plateau looked out upon a scene, the leading idea conveyed by which was that of altitude and vastness. Opposite, a line of great mountains shot up in craggy heads to the sky; their slopes alternating in slab-like cliffs and gloomy chasms running up into lateral valleys. Juniper forest, more or less sparse, straggled along the base; and but for the aridity of the all prevailing stone and the scattered vegetation, the view would have been lovely. As it stood, it was only immense. Circling kites, uttering their plaintive whistle, floated in clouds against the blue of the sky, or, gracefully steering themselves with their long forked tails, soared out over the valley.
“Fine air, too,” went on Colonel Jermyn. “After the awful heat of some of those plains stations you can appreciate it, I can tell you. But I daresay, you got a taste of that on your way up?”
“Rather. Coming through Sindh, for instance, if you leaned back suddenly in the train against the back of the seat, it was like leaning against a lot of fizzling Vesuvian heads.”
“Ah, prickly heat. We know what that is down below—don’t we, Upward?”
But the reply was lost in the soft rustle of draperies, and a softer voice:
“How do you do, Mr Upward?” As the three rose, it needed not the formal introduction. The colonel’s words seemed to sound from far away in Campian’s ears. “My niece—Miss Wymer.”
The first utterance had been enough for Campian. There was no other such voice in the world. And as he stood there, exchanging the formal hand-clasp of ordinary every-day greeting with Vivien Wymer, small wonder that his self-possession should be shaken to the core. For, five years earlier, these two had parted—in anger and bitterness on the side of one, a whole world of heart-consuming love on that of both. They had parted, agreeing to be strangers thenceforward, and had been so, nor had they set eyes on each other since. Now, by the merest of chances, and totally unprepared, they met again amid the craggy mountain ranges of wild Baluchistan.
“We were talking about the prickly heat, Vivien,” went on the colonel. “Mr Campian says it was like leaning against burning match-heads coming up in the train—ha, ha! You look a trifle below par even now,” turning to Campian. “Won’t you have a ‘peg’? Upward, excuse me—what a forgetful ass I am. So seldom I see anyone up here I’m forgetting my manners. After your long, hot ride, too!”