'A letter for you, Sir Cheyne,' the concierge had said.
It was in a lady's hand, foreign in style, and addressed to 'Sir Ranald Cheyne, Hôtel St. Antoine, E.L.V.' He opened it, and read the contents in tremulous haste.
'Ailie—my own bird Ailie—it is about her, but what?' he exclaimed, as his old eyes filled with salt tears. Then he covered his face with his hands, and added, hoarsely, 'Oh, my child, my darling Ailie!'
He strove to rise from his chair, but fell faintly into the arms of the startled concierge.
CHAPTER XXIII.
ON THE MARCH TO PRAH.
And now, while Bevil Goring is lingering somewhat hopelessly in Antwerp, hearing nothing of Alison, and with all aim apparently taken out of his life, feeling how terrible is the unknown; and Laura Dalton and Bella Chevenix are counting the days of separation from those they love—the long-lost husband in one case, the misjudged lover in the other—the transport with the Rifles on board, was running along the western coast of Africa, and some twenty days or so after the departure from Southampton saw her, with the rest of the sea and land armament, at anchor off the Gold Coast.
Save in so far as it concerns the adventures and fate of our friends Tony Dalton and Jerry Wilmot, we do not intend to write the story of how we fought there and marched to Coomassie, or what was the cause of the war, as there are never wanting old soldiers to tell the true tale of the fields in which they have fought.
Sir Richard Steele, that pleasing old essayist, in one of his fugitive papers gives us an amusing account of an ordinary in Holborn, where a veteran captain, furnished with a wooden leg, was never weary of telling long stories about the battle of Naseby, in which he had borne a part; and it is always the result of every battle or campaign of note to have survivors of it, who become perhaps after-dinner bores.
Thus the veterans of Blenheim and Malplacquet would hear with impatience the terrors of the great Civil War, but inflicted their reminiscences in turn on the victors of Dettingen and Culloden. So in turn the heroes of the glorious Peninsula have now given place to those of Alma and Inkerman, and even their annals are fading now beside those of the luckless and disastrous fields of Southern Africa.