To him and Mary the few meetings before his departure seemed heaven-sent—though a sorrowful separation was at hand—the happiest of all their past existence.
Neither seemed to question, as yet, how they would feel or could exist during the months—perhaps the more than year—of separation that had to come.
Never, never would she forget the time when he placed the engagement-ring upon her engaged finger, and when their eyes met in one long and deep glance—a glance that, though no word was uttered, proved the silent compact of his avowed and her accepted love.
So the fatal day came inexorably at last; after a farewell dinner to him at the Guards' Club in Pall Mall.
'Good-bye, dear girls,' said he, cheerily; 'good-bye, love Mary—another kiss and another. I'll bring you back such wonderful things from India—tiger-skins, and tiger claws set in gold; Delhi jewellery from Chandney Chowk; ivory carvings, and I know not what more,' he added, and, in spite of himself, strove to be cheerful; 'and when I do come back, Mary, you will be my own darling little wife till death parts us.'
So the hour, the supreme moment, had come at last, and Leslie Colville was gone!
His letters were Mary's only solace after that; long letters full of loving and passionate expression, to be read and re-read again; from Suez, burning Aden, and beautiful Bombay; they came regularly, but became fewer and further between as he proceeded up country by railway, and his last, before they left London for the Continent, informed her that he had been appointed to the staff at Jellalabad, where Sir Samuel Browne was concentrating his forces prior to an advance on Cabul. Thus he would soon be going to the Front.
CHAPTER XI.
AT JELLALABAD.
'Well, Colville, how do you like India from what you have seen of it?' asked Colonel Spatterdash, as he sat smoking in his shirt and pyjamas, for, though the month was March, the solar heat was already considerable in that part of Afghanistan, and quite disagreeable by eight in the morning.