"Then take him with you, I have no objection to the voyage, or serving in India which I have often wished to see."
"Oh, no. Baby is best here, for his own sake. In India I have all sorts of anxieties. I would have to go alone."
"But there are many ladies who stay in Europe for the sake of their children, leaving their husbands in India. In my last place, my mistress, whose husband was a Forest officer living in lonely places among the blacks, spent most of her time with her people in England as she could not abide the natives, and the climate upset her nerves. Only, occasionally, she visited him in the East, and sometimes he came home."
"What a life!" sighed Joyce. "I know it is done, but it isn't right"—she was thinking of Honor's letter. "Both go different ways, and what love and happiness is there for them?"
"But that is always so when ladies have husbands in India!"
"It need not be so. It makes me wonder why men marry when they know the risk they run of broken domestic ties, and the burdens they have to bear! It isn't worth while, if a man is to become only the means of providing money for the comforts of his family, and keeping very little, or none for himself—poor dear!"
Decidedly, Joyce Meredith's views had undergone a change.
The questions pressing on her mind were—Where was she most needed? and where, most, lay her heart's desire?
In her case, duty and desire were no longer in conflict. Clearly, her place was beside her husband as long as she was capable of enduring the climate, and her heart was sick with longing for him.
"I shall be going out almost immediately—as soon as it can possibly be arranged," she said coming to a sudden decision. "Pack the trunks early in the morning, and we shall return home in the afternoon to fix this up. It will be a great comfort to me, nurse, to know that you will stay with Baby."