'That dear fellow gets more considerate every day,' she said, looking round her with a glowing face, as she folded up her letter. 'He doesn't forget anybody. I should like to answer his letter as soon as possible'—to the rajah. 'When are you sending?'
'I shall send off my congratulations to-night,' said Tom, smiling.
'Oh! then, excuse me everybody. I must write at once,' said Trixy.
To what vagaries she committed herself in the solitary recesses of her room, it would be unfair to relate here. All I can venture to say is that the letter which resulted, and which arrived in camp on the eve of the gallant fight that scattered Tantia Topee's army, broke the spirit of the rebels in the North-West, and gave back Cawnpore to the English, was received and read with a transport of admiring love and gratitude that its recipient would always maintain carried him scatheless and triumphant through the dangers of that tremendous day.
'I verily believe,' he said to Trixy later, when, after his own light fashion, he was narrating the exploit that had won for him the English soldier's dearest reward for gallantry—the Victoria Cross, 'I verily believe that I was too happy and proud a creature to die that day. There was no killing me.'
'The dark angel hovered over you, and had not the heart to strike,' said Trixy, whose bright eyes were dim with tears.
But this belongs to the future, for before she met Bertie again Trixy had some dark and bitter days to live through.
She was passionately attached to her mother, and while, without understanding Grace in the least, she had always had a sisterly regard for her, she had never loved her as she did now, when admiration, tenderness, pride in her as a heroine, and some little sense of exultation in the part she might play in the future had reinforced her sisterly feeling. And now, since the brief revival which followed on the news from Lucknow, inspired partly, as Trixy felt with a curious throb of tenderness, by sympathy for herself and Bertie, there was added to her love a devotion strong enough, the poor child believed, to fight with and overcome the invisible forces that were preying upon her sister's life. 'Grace shall not die, she shall not!' Trixy would say. 'I will prevent her.' For two or three days she would let no one but herself do anything for Grace, scarcely speak to her. With the energy and strong will that belonged to her, she would sweep them all away. 'She wants life—life, do you hear?' she would cry. 'You people are sad. You let her brood and dream.'
Even Tom was only allowed to see her at Trixy's time and in Trixy's presence. 'You will thank me some day,' she said to him one day, pressing his hand with sisterly cordiality, and for the moment he almost believed in her. 'If you bring her back to us, Trixy,' he said, with a sob in his throat, 'there is nothing I will not do for you.'
'Ah, I shall remember that,' she said, nodding to him gaily, and then she took her measures. Kit, the gayest and naturally the most effusive of the party, was taken into her counsels. He was told that it was his mission to be amusing, and he showed his sense of the honour conferred upon him by being so delightfully important that Trixy would almost forget her own mission in the amusement of watching him. Aglaia, on whose little life the shadow which was enfolding those dearest to her seemed to have fallen, was warned privately not to look solemn, and she, too, began to be amusing in pretty prim ways that were charming to behold. 'It is a perpetual little comedy with those children,' Trixy said to her mother one day.