'But to keep the secret so long—I might never have learned it, for to-morrow will see us separated. Hastings was the first volume of our romance.'
'Southampton was the second.'
'The third is Ashanti. How it will end, God alone knows, darling,' he added, straining her in his embrace, while her tears fell fast now; 'if spared to return to you, Laura—to you and little Netty—you will never regret your love and trust in me at last—your confidence in my affection.'
Poor Dalton—'if spared;' he was right to say that, with the fate and fortune of a barbarous war before him.
The old love had become the new one, and the new love was the old; and yet it seemed that to-night both had entered on a new relationship.
And, as we have said, the two last appeals of Jerry Wilmot and Dalton ended differently. Practically they came to the same conclusion—a separation from those they loved.
Laura now deplored deeply her pride and folly, as she deemed it, in playing the game she had done so long; but the separation had to be faced and endured; yet she watched the transport, as it steamed down Southampton water, till it melted into the haze; and it was not until then that she fully realised that her husband, so lately restored to her, was gone again, and perhaps for ever.
But that her appearance on board would have excited speculation in the battalion, she would have gone down the Channel with the steamer and come ashore in the pilot's boat at Deal.
On the long, though rapid voyage, Dalton had ample food for reflection, for thinking of the strangeness of his fate, that for months past he had been associating with, meeting and seeing at intervals, and loving deeply, a woman who was his own wife, and yet he knew it not!
Why had she played this perilous game so long?