“It was her last disappointment that you were not sent home on sick leave. Did you get well too fast?”
“Not exactly; but my father, or rather, I believe, my brother, intimated that I should be welcome only if I had laid aside a certain foolish fancy, and as lying on my back had not conduced to that end, I could only say I would stay where I was.”
“And was it worse for you? I am sure, in spite of all that tanned skin, that your health has suffered. Ought you to have come home?”
“No, I do not know that London surgeons could have got at the ball,” he said, putting his hand on his chest, “and it gives me no trouble in general. I was such a spectacle when I returned to duty, that good old Sir Stephen Temple, always a proverb for making his staff a refuge for the infirm, made me his aide-de-camp, and was like a father to me.”
“Now I see why I never could find your name in any list of the officers in the moves of the regiment! I gave you quite up when I saw no Keith among those that came home from India. I did believe then that you were the Colonel Alexander Keith whose death I had seen mentioned, though I had long trusted to his not being honourable, nor having your first name.”
“Ah! he succeeded to the command after Lady Temple’s father. A kind friend to me he was, and he left me in charge of his son and daughter. A very good and gallant fellow is that young Alick. I must bring him to see you some day—”
“Oh! I saw his name; I remember! I gloried in the doings of a Keith; but I was afraid he had died, as there was no such name with the regiment when it came home.”
“No, he was almost shattered to pieces; but Sir Stephen sent him up the hills to be nursed by Lady Temple and her mother, and he was sent home as soon as he could be moved. I was astonished to see how entirely he had recovered.”
“Then you went through all that Indian war?”
“Yes; with Sir Stephen.”