'And why did you not speak to me?'
'I am not now what I was—when hoping to be a graduate of the Edinburgh University, but a poor hussar—un simple soldat.'
'Simple, indeed, to throw your chances in life away thus—and even your life too, as you so nearly did a few minutes ago.'
'I had none left—none that I cared for,' said Robert, hoarsely.
While this conversation was taking place, the infantry and artillery had halted, and the brigadier, with all the cavalry, had pushed on in pursuit of the fugitive Mohmunds as far as a place called Gurdao, in a gorge, where the Cabul river flows out of the valley of Jellalabad.
On an islet in the river there are the remains of an old Buddhist monastery, surrounded by a tope of hoary trees. For here had once been the worship of Buddha—a worship which, though now almost banished from India, has spread over countries of an almost wider area, and is usually ranked as the ninth avatar of Vishnu.
Here a few of the Mohmunds made their last stand, till the best cavalry marksmen picked them off with their carbines, and the whole troops began a retrograde movement towards Jellalabad.
Colville was once more in his saddle, and, by Redhaven's permission, Robert Wodrow attended to him on the march.
'I wish I understood the law of crises,' says the author of Altiora Peto. 'I suppose it has an intimate connection with that other mysterious problem, the law of chances ... I have always had a theory,' he adds, 'that from time to time our lives culminate to crises. Then the crisis bursts, and we begin again, and slowly or rapidly, as the case may be, culminate to another crisis.'
Well, here was a crisis and something more in connection with the law of chances. The two men who loved the two sisters, Mary and Ellinor Wellwood, under circumstances and with success so different, by the birks of Invermay, were now face to face and together in that far-away land of peril.