Meanwhile, 'the shadow, cloaked from head to foot, who keeps the keys of all the creeds,' was hovering perilously near Jack, for whom Roland procured quarters in a pleasant house in the beautiful Shoubrah Road, near Cairo—a broad but shady avenue formed of noble sycamores, the 'Rotten Row' of the city, and day followed day somewhat monotonously now, though a letter dated some weeks back from his legal friend of Thistle Court gave Roland some occasion for gratifying thought.
'If you can return,' it ran, 'must I remind you that now Earlshaugh is unoccupied; the land so far neglected, and the tenants well-nigh forgotten; the rents are accumulating at your bankers', but no good is done to anyone. Your proper place and position is your own again; justice has restored your birthright; so come home at once and act wisely—home, my dear friend, and you shall have such a welcome as Earlshaugh has not seen since your father came back after the Crimean War.'
Pondering over this letter and on what the future might have in store, Roland was one afternoon idling over a cigarette in the gardens of the Shoubrah Palace, an edifice which rises from the bank of the Nile. On one side are pleasant glimpses of the latter, with its palm-clad banks and sparkling villages; on the other a tract of brilliantly tinted cultivation, and beyond it the golden sands of the desert, the shifting hillocks they form, and the gray peaks of several pyramids.
The gardens, surpassingly beautiful and purely Oriental in character, are entered by long and winding walks of impenetrable shade, from which we emerge on open spaces that team with roses, with gilded pavilions and painted kiosks. 'Arched walks of orange-trees with the fruit and flowers hanging over your head lead to fountains,' says a Jewish writer, 'or to some other garden court, where myrtles border beds of tulips, and you wander on mosaic walks of polished pebbles; a vase flashes amid a group of dark cypresses, and you are invited to repose under a Syrian walnut-tree by a couch or summer-house. The most striking picture, however, of this charming retreat is a lake surrounded by light cloisters of white marble, and in the centre a fountain of crocodiles carved in the same material.'
Lulled by the heat, by the drowsy hum made by the sound of many carriages filled with harem beauties or European ladies rolling to and fro on the adjacent Shoubrah Road, with the ceaseless patter of hoofs, as mounted Cairene dandies and our cavalry officers rode in the same gay promenade, Roland reclined on a marble seat, lit another cigarette, and watched the giant flowers of the Egyptian lotus in the little lake, blue and white, that sink when the sun sets, but open and rise when it is shining, till suddenly he saw a young lady appear, who was evidently idling in the gardens like himself.
He could see that she was a European. With one glove drawn off, showing a hand the pure whiteness of which contrasted with her dark dress, she was playing with the water of a red marble fountain that fell sparkling into the lakelet, not ten yards from where he was seated, unseen by her.
Suddenly his figure, in his undress uniform, caught her eye; she turned and looked full at him, as if spellbound.
'Roland!' she exclaimed.
'Hester—good heavens, can it be?—Hester, and here!' said he.
Hester she was; he sprang to her side, and they took each other's hands, both for a moment in dumb confusion and bewilderment. At the moment of this meeting and before recognition, even when hovering near him, and he had been all unconscious of who the tall and slender girl in mourning really was, she had been thinking of him, and as she had often thought—