“Good-bye, Uncle Luke. Be happy about them here; and, mind, we are dying for news.”
“Ah! yes; I know,” he said testily; and he walked away—turned back, and caught Madelaine to his breast. “Good-bye, Dutch doll. God bless you, my darling,” he said huskily. “If I could only bring back poor Harry too!”
Madelaine stood wiping the tears from her eyes as the old man hurried off after Leslie, but she wiped another tear away as well, one which rested on her cheek, a big salt tear that ought almost to have been a fossil globule of crystallised water and salt. It was the first Uncle Luke had shed for fifty years.
Chapter Fifty Six.
Hard Test.
“Harry, dear Harry!” said Louise, as they stood together in a shabbily furnished room in one of the streets off Tottenham Court Road, “I feel at times as if it would drive me mad. Pray, pray let me write!”
“Not yet, I tell you; not yet,” he said angrily. “Wait till we are across the Channel, and then you shall.”
“But—”