'The English winter ending in July,
To recommence in August,'
to the lady's mind was associated only with dinners, concerts, races, balls, the opera, garden parties, and so forth, all of which she was relinquishing for an apparently hopeless purpose, while she knew that all her fashionable friends would be having strange surmises on the cause of this most unusual rustication, and inquiring of each other, 'What are the Fettercairns about?'
Dulcie was painfully sensible that the lady of the house had become cold, stiff, and most exacting in manner to her, even condescending to sneer at times, with a well-bred tone and bearing that some high-born ladies can assume when they wish to sting dependants or equals alike.
Finella's other grandmother, my Lady Drumshoddy, had ceased to be quite so indignant at her repulsion to Shafto, as she had a nephew—son of a sister—coming home on leave from India; and she thought perhaps the heiress might see her way to present herself and her thousands to young Major Ronald Garallan, of the Bengal Lancers, who had the reputation of being a handsome fellow and a regular 'lady-killer.'
Days and days and long weary weeks passed by—weeks of longing—and no word of hope, of love, or apology came to Finella across the seas from distant Africa, evolved as she hoped by the letter of Dulcie to Florian, and her heart grew sick with hope deferred, while more battles and skirmishes were fought, and she knew not that a vessel with the mail containing that missive which Florian posted at the orderly-room tent had been cast away in the Bight of Benin, and that the bags had been saved with extreme difficulty.
She contemplated Vivian Hammersley facing danger in battle and sickness in camp, marching and toiling in trackless regions, with one belief ever in his angry heart that she had been false to him—she who loved him more truly and passionately every day. So time seemed to pass monotonously on, and her unsatisfied longing to be justified grew almost to fever heat; and death might take him away before he knew of her innocence. She tried to be patient, though writhing under the evil eyes of Shafto, the author of all this mischief.
Could it be that Vivian had been driven away from her for ever? Daily she brooded over the unhappy story of her apparent fault and its bitter punishment, and she would seem to murmur in her heart, 'Come back to me, my darling. Oh, how am I to live on thus without you?'
And amid all this no sense of pride or mortification came to support her.
By the two girls the Cape news was, of course, closely and nervously watched. The tidings of Florian's promotion stirred the hearts of both; but to anyone else in Craigengowan it was, of course, a matter of profound indifference, if remarked at all.
A telegram briefly announced, without details, that Captain Hammersley had been wounded after the skirmish at the Euzangonyan Hill, but nothing more, as the papers were filled by the death of the Prince Imperial; so, in the absence of other information, the heart of Finella was wrung to its core.