There was no one else to sustain Elizabeth. Darrell needed comforting even more than herself. She had formed no intimacies with any of the ladies of the station. There were among them many kind and tender-hearted women, but a barrier had grown up between them and the stranger from America.
Gradually the truth was beginning to dawn upon Elizabeth, that she depended more upon Pelham than upon Darrell; that is to say, she had married the wrong man, and the full revelation of this terrible truth came to her within two months of the time that she was left childless. It was in the heat of summer, and Elizabeth was one of those two or three of the officers’ wives, who braved the terrors of the hot season away from the hills in order to be with their husbands.
One stifling August evening, about ten o’clock, as Elizabeth was walking in the small grounds around their bungalow, the moon shining upon the tops of the great cypress trees which skirted the grounds, Pelham came down the steps of the veranda at the back of the house and joined her. The night was hot, as only Indian nights can be, but Elizabeth in her filmy white gown looked cool. She was as graceful and charming as ever, for the touch of sorrow, the knowledge of disappointment, and the necessity of keeping ceaseless watch and ward upon her own heart had added a deeper interest to her beauty while robbing her of some of her girlish fairness. Pelham, who was in mufti, wore a suit of white linen, and the two white figures could be seen for half a mile. They had not met since morning, a long time for them to be apart, because Pelham, who had lived with Darrell after the manner of a brother before his marriage, had continued it ever since. As he came up, holding his straw hat in his hand, Elizabeth said to him:—
“Where have you been all day? We waited dinner for you until at last we could wait no longer, as I wanted my poor Jack to go to the club. It doesn’t do for him to stay in this house too much.”
“...She caught him by the arm and whispered, ‘And could you leave me?’”
“I have been hard at work all day,” replied Pelham, in a tired voice. “I got a letter at noon to-day, offering me a staff appointment. It would be a very good thing, a great thing, and I have been studying it over and looking things up concerning it all the afternoon and evening. It would take me away from the regiment for a good many years, but still—“
Elizabeth’s face was quite plain to him in the white moonlight. She was already pale from the heat and from her months of suffering, but he saw a total change of expression, a look of terror, come into her eyes. It was unmistakable. Pelham himself had long known how things were with him, and it was chiefly from despair that he had seriously considered that day tearing himself from Elizabeth. He thought she would miss him as a woman misses a friend and brother, but something in her sad and lovely eyes suddenly revealed to him that it was not as a friend and brother she would miss him, but as the being dearest to her on earth; and Pelham, being then tempted of the devil, asked in a low voice:—