“All right.” And in a moment more the clatter of the horse’s hoofs died away down the path, and the swarthy Baluchi, in his Khaki uniform, jogged indifferently upon his way, as though he were not the bearer of that which by a turn or freak of thought had just escaped being an agency for entailing solemn consequences upon one or more lives.
“By George! this hill air seems to suit you, child,” cried the jolly colonel, gazing upon his niece with undisguised admiration. “I can’t make out what all these young fellows—young fools, I call them—are about. Eh?”
“Have I not got a dear old uncle, who talks shocking nonsense on privileged occasions?” returned Vivien, slipping her hand within his arm. “Why, I am getting as old as the hills, and am ‘going off’ perceptibly every hour. Do I not own a looking-glass?”
“A looking-glass? Pooh! it’s a lying one then. We’ll pitch it over the khud, and send Der’ Ali down to the bazaar for one that is more truthful. But, then—I am forgetting. This isn’t Baghnagar, and there’s no bazaar.”
“No, there isn’t, and a good thing too, if it is going to conduce to such scandalous waste,” retorted Vivien brightly.
“I believe it’s not fair, eh? It seems hard lines on you, child, shutting you up here, with no one to talk to but a prosy old fellow like me, eh?”
“Now, Uncle Edward, it is you who will have to go over that khud instead of my poor, unoffending, candid looking-glass, if you persist in talking such a prodigious quantity of nonsense.”
That evening the Levy sowar arrived in due course, with Colonel Jermyn’s post, and clattered off, bearing that of Upward. But the letter addressed to Howard Campian, at Chirria Bach, still lay upon Vivien’s writing-table.