"Honey, you are an idealist! I wonder how many women could exercise so much forbearance! Think of the anger, the humiliation, the resentment! It is an outrage to one's faith and trust!"
"If you had remained within reach of him so that when he was ill you could have gone to him at once, there would have been nothing to forgive. But for a frivolous reason you put the seas between you and threw his love back into his face. You are also very much to blame," said Honor boldly.
Joyce covered her face with her hands and wept silently.
Honor saw her into her train at Sealdah Station the following day, and after an afternoon spent in shopping for her mother, returned to Muktiarbad.
Joyce spent an uncomfortable night in the train on account of the muggy heat which was barely rendered tolerable by electric fans in the compartment, and was glad when the time came to transfer herself and her baggage into the toy railway of the Himalayas, which rattled briskly up the slopes by tortuous tracks into higher altitudes and cooler climes.
A party of ladies known to each other occupied the same compartment and chattered of all they did in Darjeeling last year, and all they meant to do. Joyce paid little heed while silently watching the changing views as the train wound its way along the mountain sides. The infinite grandeur of Nature on which humanity had set its stamp, thrilled her with wonderment and delight. All personal troubles were forgotten for a while as the glorious scenery unfolded to her vision.
Surely her eyes must have been holden when she saw it a year ago!
Heavy mists sweeping the mountain sides frequently obliterated a picture of purple distances and rugged heights. Anon, there was a blaze of sunlight revealing wooded spurs with zinc-roofed cottages and grey villages nestling on their slopes. Green valleys lay at the foot of frowning precipices, and round many a bend and curve were glimpses of tea gardens with the bushes laid out in serried rows; and cumbrous, zinc-roofed tea factories looking strangely incongruous in their wild and glorious setting.
With a rush of sound, a waterfall would be seen, as a curve was rounded, tumbling over rocks and rushing under a bridge on its way to join some mighty river in the plains. The plains were often visible, stretching like a grey sea to the horizon, their surface marked by the silver tracery of streams. Now and then, Joyce could catch a glimpse of the Everlasting Snows, with Kinchin-junga, Nursing, and Pundeem, a mighty group glittering in the sunlight in stately magnificence, their peaks inaccessible to man. Beside the road, a stout parapet of boulders covered by ferns and lichen, stood, in places, between the passengers and certain death, a thousand feet below; while up the steep banks rose forests of sal and fir, climbing towards the sky.