Little could Cameron imagine that Eveline was so near to him as she was then!
Often had he dreamt of her face—not when he longed to do so, but when visions of it came upon him unbidden while he lay asleep on the deck of the transport, in the bivouacs in the desert, amid the wards of the hospital at Ismailia and elsewhere, and it always came before him with a sweetness, a loving expression, and a strange spiritual charm impossible to define or describe.
After the mutual revelations of the two friends, the intermittent fever of Allan seemed to become more deadly, and by the time that Lord Aberfeldie arrived at the hospital he almost failed to recognise his son, so much had the latter sunk; for, the temporary excitement consequent to the meeting with Cameron having subsided, Allan's health seemed visibly to retrograde, and each fit of shivering rendered him weaker than the last.
A staff-surgeon had prepared Allan for the visit of his father, who was manifestly shocked when he saw how prostrate he was, and, as they pressed each other's hands, Lord Aberfeldie perceived how thin, bony, and wasted those of his son had become.
'My poor boy,' he exclaimed; 'how is this I find you?'
'Not dying, father, but very near it, I fear,' replied Allan, with a sickly smile.
Lord Aberfeldie gazed lovingly and sadly into his son's wasted face, and thought of all his mother, his sister, and Olive would feel on seeing him thus, and in such a squalid place.
Amid the suffering and misery they were enduring, Lord Aberfeldie thought it strange to hear many expressing regret that the war was over so soon, and 'Arabi snuffed out.'
The realisation of Sir Garnet Wolseley's confident prediction that all would be ended by the 16th of September, put an abrupt and speedy end to all chances of promotion and glory, and now everyone thought only of going home as fast as possible.
In the huge improvised military hospital much existed, as in every such place, that proved rather repugnant to the ideas of a fastidious man, so Lord Aberfeldie resolved upon having Allan removed to another place—a hotel or villa—whither, when the surgeon would permit it, he would have him conveyed by soldiers in a dhooley; and, full of this purpose, he rejoined the ladies, who awaited his return with the keenest anxiety.