"The guides came in to camp yesterday. Splendid fellows. They were at it hammer and tongs immediately, though that man Rujjub Ali I told you of--it was he who said Hodson was with the force--declares they marched from Murdin in twenty-one days. Over thirty miles a day! Well! they looked like it. I saw them ride slap up to the Cabul gate. And--and I saw someone else with them, Mrs. Erlton. I wasn't sure at first if I had better tell you; but I think I had. I saw your husband."
"My husband," she echoed faintly. In truth the past seemed to have slipped from her. She seemed to have forgotten so much; and then suddenly she remembered that the letter he had written must still be in the pocket of the dress Tara had hidden away. How strange! She must find it, and look at it again.
Jim Douglas watched her curiously with a quick recognition of his own rough touch. Yet it could not be helped.
"Yes. He was looking splendid, doing splendidly. I couldn't help wishing---- Well! I wish you could have seen him; you would have been proud."
She interrupted him with swift, appealing hand. "Oh!--don't--please don't--what have I to do with it? Can't you see--can't you understand he was thinking of--of her--and doesn't she deserve it? while I--I----"
It was the first breakdown he had seen during those long weeks of strain, and he stood absolutely, wholly compassionate before it.
"My dear lady," he said gently, as he walked away to give her time, "if you good women would only recognize the fact which worse ones do, that most men think of many women in their lives, you would be happier. But I doubt if Major Erlton was thinking of anyone in particular. He was thinking of the dead, and you are among them, for him; remember that. Come," he continued, crossing over to her again and holding out his hand. "Cheer up! Aren't you always telling me it is bad for a man to have one woman on the brain, and think, think how many there may be to avenge by this time!"
His voice, sounding a whole gamut of emotion, a whole cadence of consolation, seemed to find an echo in her heart, and she looked up at him gratefully.
It would have found one also in most hearts upon the Ridge, where men were beginning to think with a sort of mad fury of women and children in a hundred places to which this unchecked conflagration of mutiny was spreading swiftly. What would become of Lucknow, Cawnpore, Agra, if something were not done at Delhi? if the challenge so well given were not followed up? And men elsewhere telegraphed the same question, until, half-heartedly, the General listened, and finally gave a grudging assent to a plan of assault urged by four subalterns.
What the details were matters little. A bag of gunpowder somewhere, with fixed bayonets to follow. A gamester's throw for sixes or deuce-ace, so said even its supporters. But anything seemed better than being a target for artillery practice five times better than their own, while the mutiny spread around them.