'I shall go and earn my living, Maude—be a governess, or something,' she said, as her plans began to mature. 'It cannot be difficult to teach little children; though I always hated my own lessons, I know, even when helped by—Roland.'
'Nonsense, Hester!' exclaimed Maude; 'you shall live with me and—and Jack, if he ever returns, and all is well. You are too pretty to be a governess; no wise matron would have you.'
'Why?'
'Because all the grown sons and brothers would be falling in love with you. So you must stay with me.'
But Hester was resolute.
To the many letters of the former—letters agonising in tenor—addressed to Jack Elliot and to her brother Roland, no answer ever came, while weeks became months; for many difficulties just then attended the correspondence of the troops that were on the arduous expedition for the relief of Khartoum.
Thus, amid all the sorrows of Hester, how keen and great was the anxiety of Maude!
Jack, her husband—if he was her husband—was now face to face with the enemy—those terrible Soudanese—and might perish in the field, by drowning, or by fever, before she could ever have elucidated the mystery, the cloud, the horrible barrier that had come between them.
At times the emotions that shook the tender form of Maude were terrible, since the night of that woman's visit, when the iron seemed to enter her soul; and there descended upon her a darkness through which there had come no gleam of light.
The past and the future seemed all absorbed in the blank misery of the present, and as if her life was to be one career of abiding shame, emptiness, and misery, as a dishonoured wife—if wife she was at all!