The delight of Dulcie on unfolding her epistles was only equalled by the delight and gratitude of Finella on receiving hers.
'Oh Dulcie, Dulcie!' ran the letter of Florian (with the whole of which we do not mean to afflict the reader), 'while here—thousands of miles away from you—how often my heart sickens with hungry longing for a sight of your face—for the sound of your voice, the sound I may never hear again; for in war time we know not what an hour may bring forth, or on each day if we shall see to-morrow. But, for all that, don't be alarmed about me. I have not the smallest intention of departing this life prematurely, if I can help it. I'll turn up again, never fear, darling—assegais, rifles, and so forth, nevertheless. The chances of our lives ever coming together again seemed very small when first we parted, yet somehow, dear Dulcie, I am more hopeful now; and something more may turn up when we least expect it; and we never know what a day may bring forth.'
Florian was far, far away from her, yet the sight of his letter, perhaps the first he had ever written to her, gave the lone Dulcie, for a time, a blissful sense of love and protection she had never felt since that fatal morning when she found her father dead 'in harness'—dead at his desk. Oh, that she could but lay her head on Florian's breast!
And as Finella read and re-read Hammersley's letter a bright, sweet, happy smile curved her lips—the lips that he had kissed in that first time of supreme happiness, that now seemed so long, long ago.
'I have been cruel, hard, suspicious,' wrote Hammersley, 'till that fine young fellow, then a sergeant of ours—the sergeant of my squadron—a lad of birth and breeding evidently, showed me the letter of Miss Carlyon—at least that part of it which referred to us, darling. I did not know till then how bitterly I had been deceived, and how we had both been imposed upon. Pardon me for the cruel note I wrote you, and forgive me. But, Finella, as we have often said before, what view will your people take of us—of me? I am not quite a poor man, though very much so when compared with you. Think if monetary matters were reversed, and you accepted a rich man who asked you to wed him, would not people say it was his money you wanted?'
'Fiddlesticks!' whispered Finella parenthetically; 'what matters it what people say, if we love each other? We marry to please ourselves, Vivian, not them!'
'There are some arts that come by intuition to some people,' continued Hammersley, 'and, by Jove! darling, that of soldiering has come to your friend Miss Carlyon's admirer. His career will be a sure one; not that I believe the marshal's baton is often found in the knapsack of Tommy Atkins. He was an enigma to me; his youth and all that belonged thereto seemed dead and buried—his past a secret, which he cared about revealing to none; but such are the influences of camp life and camaraderie that I drew to him, and now I am as familiar with the name of little Dulcie with the golden hair—golden, is it not?—as yourself; so give her a kiss for me. I owe her much—I owe her the happiness of my life in dispelling the dark cloud that rose between us—in taking the load from my heart that made me blind and desperate, so that it is a marvel that I have not been killed long ago.'
As she read on, to Finella it seemed that it was all a dream that there ever had been any bitterness between them at all; that his fierce, short note, pencilled in haste and delivered by the butler, had ever existed, or that he had left her abruptly and hastily, without a word or a glance of tenderness—not even uttering her name, perhaps, the musical name he was wont to linger over so lovingly; that he had ever gone from her in a natural and pardonable tempest of anger and jealousy.
And now how well and fondly she could recall their first introduction in London, though it seemed so long ago, when their eyes first met with a sudden and subtle understanding, 'and their glances seemed to mingle as two gases meet and take fire,' as a writer says quaintly; and though they had spoken but little then, and well-bred commonplaces only, each had felt that there were looks and tones untranslatable, yet full of sweet and hidden meaning to the sensitive.
For a time, as if loth to go back to the work-a-day world, both girls sat under Queen Mary's Thorn, each with letter in hand, lost in a maze of happy dreams. They could see the shrubberies and the woods about the mansion in all the glory of midsummer, the smooth spaces of emerald greensward, the balustraded terrace with its stately flights of steps, and the pool below it, where the white waterlilies and the white swans floated in sunshine; but all was seen dreamily, and to their ears like drowsy music came the hum of the honey-bee and the twittering and voices of the birds, while a beloved name hovered on the soft lips of each, and seemed to be reproduced in the songs of the linnet and thrush.