He had gone into his own cabin on board the Ithuriel, which was being rapidly prepared for her roving commission, to read his letters in solitude. He put Alma’s photograph on the table, and sat before it with his eyes fixed upon it until every line of form and tint of colour was indelibly impressed anew upon his memory.
Then he kissed it as reverently as a devotee of old might have kissed a sacred relic, and then he attached the oval miniature to a chain of alternate links of azurine and gold, and hung it round his neck inside his tunic, registering a mental vow that if death came before he once more wore the golden wings, it should find it lying nearest his heart.
“This,” he said, speaking to himself, as he took Isma’s photograph up from the table, and looked fondly upon the radiantly lovely face that looked out from its frame, “is evidently not intended for me. Isma doesn’t say who it’s for, but I fancy that there is some one on board the Ithuriel who has a very much better right to it than I have. I wonder if Alexis is in his room?”
So saying, he left his cabin and found his friend still deep in the perusal of two lengthy letters from his father and mother.
“So you have had letters from home as well, old man? I hope they’ve been as pleasant reading as mine have,” he said, going to the couch on which Alexis was sitting, and holding one hand behind his back.
“Yes, they’re from my father and mother, and so they can scarcely be anything else, so far as what they do say. It’s what they don’t say that gives me the only cause to find fault with them. But still that, I suppose, would be expecting too much under the circumstances.”
He ended with something very like a sigh, and Alan replied as gravely as he could—
“And what might that be, my knight of the rueful countenance? Don’t you think the Council have treated us splendidly, and given us a glorious opportunity of winning back all that the daughter of the Tsar has robbed us of?”
“Of course, I do,” replied Alexis, looking up at him with a flush on his cheeks. “But for all that there is one thing still, something that I am not ashamed to say I value above everything else that I have lost or can regain.”
“And that is—?”