This was insisted on, and after that the victim sank rapidly.
As he lay dying, he seemed in fancy, as his feeble mutterings indicated, to float through the air as his thoughts and aspirations fled homeward—homeward by Aden, the Red Sea, and Cairo—homeward by Malta and the white cliffs to the home of the Collingwoods; and he saw Ida standing on the threshold to welcome him; and then, when her fancied kiss fell on his lips, the soul of the poor fellow passed away.
The name of Ida was the last sound he uttered.
All was silent then, till as Trevor Chute closed his eyes he heard the merry drums beating the reveille through the echoing cantonments.
CHAPTER III.
HIS VISIT TO CLARE.
Though not yet thirty years of age, Trevor Chute was no longer a young man with a wild and unguessed idea of existence before him. Thought and experience of life had tamed him down, and made him in many respects more a man of the world than when last he stood upon the threshold of Sir Carnaby Collingwood's stately mansion in Piccadilly, and left it, as he thought, for ever behind him.
Yet even now a thrill came over him as he rang the visitors' bell.
It would have been wiser, perhaps, and, circumstanced as he was with the family, the most proper mode, to have simply written to Sir Carnaby or to Ada Beverley instead of calling; but he had promised his friend, when dying at Landour, to see her personally; and it is not improbable that in the kindness of his heart Jack Beverley, even in that awful hour, was not without a hope that the visit might eventually lead to something conducive to the future happiness of his friend, to whom the chance of such a hope had certainly never occurred.
Trevor Chute had urged Jerry Vane to accompany him, hoping, by the aid of his presence and companionship, to escape some of the awkwardness pertaining to his visit; but the latter, though on terms of passable intimacy with the family still, and more especially since the widowhood of Ida, considering the peculiar mission of Chute to her, begged to be excused on this occasion.