From time to time, inspired by kindness and curiosity, he watched his name among the captains in the military lists of that thick compendium which no Scottish business establishment is ever without—'Oliver and Boyd's Almanack.' Therein, after a while, the name of Lennard Melfort disappeared, but whether he was dead, had sold out, or 'gone to the bad,' the worthy Writer to the Signet could not discover, and he not unnaturally sighed over what he deemed a lost life.
And here we end that which is a species of prologue to our story.
CHAPTER IV.
REVELSTOKE COTTAGE.
More than twenty years had elapsed after the episodes we have described, and Lennard and Flora had found a new home, and she, her last one, more than four hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies from where Craigengowan looks down on the German Sea. But none that looked on Lennard Melfort now would have recognised in the prematurely aged man the handsome young fellow who in ire and disgust had quitted his native land.
In two years after he had gone eastward a dreadful fever, contracted in a place where he had volunteered on a certain duty to gain money for the support of his wife and her little Indian establishment—the Terrai of Nepaul, that miasmatic border of prairie which lies along the great forest of the Himalayas, and has an evil repute even among the natives of the country in the wet season when the leaves are falling.
This fever broke Lennard's health completely, and so changed him that his rich brown hair and moustache were grey at six-and-twenty, and ere long he looked like a man of twice his age.
'Can that fellow really be Lennard Melfort of the Fusiliers? Why, he is a veritable Knight of the Rueful Countenance!' exclaimed some old friends who saw him at 'The Rag,' when he came home to seek a place of quiet and seclusion in Devonshire, as it subsequently chanced to be.
Amid the apple bowers of the land of cider, and near a beautiful little bay into which the waters of the British Channel rippled, stood the pretty and secluded cottage he occupied, as 'Major MacIan,' with his son and a nephew.
The wooded hills around it were not all covered with orchards, however, and the little road that wound round the bay ran under eminences that, from their aspect, might make a tourist think he was skirting a Swiss lake. Others were heath-clad and fringed at the base by a margin of grey rocks.