He was pale with a strange grey pallor, totally unlike his usually sunburned and healthy tint, and he looked dazed as his face sank forward on his breast.
'Our poor boy—our poor boy!'
'God help us, Aberfeldie! What is it?'
Olive snatched up the paper, and, after reading the paragraph we have copied, reeled into a chair. And now a great horror fell upon all the three, the mother's memory flashing back to the baby-boy that had crowed and smiled upon her knee, and whose first tottering efforts to cross the nursery floor she remembered yet.
Lord Aberfeldie, after recovering a little from the shock, telegraphed to the War-Office for further information, but could obtain none. They read the fatal paragraph again and again, till every word of it seemed to be burned into their brains, and could but indulge in endless surmises, and hope against hope; for had not the public prints been teeming with the harrowing details of the capture of Professor Palmer, Captain Gill, and Lieutenant Charrington, and of them being pitilessly slaughtered by the Bedouins of the Aligal tribe?
As Olive recalled all this, her blood grew cold with apprehension. The paragraph, though a terrible one, was frightfully vague. He was 'supposed to have fallen' into the hands of the Bedouins. At all events, his party had come into Grand Cairo without him!
She, like Lady Aberfeldie, could not realise it for a time. Alternately she sat like one stunned, and then walked up and down the room with her slender fingers interlaced tightly and clasped upon her head, as if she would thereby still the trouble that throbbed in her brain and repress her heavy sorrow.
In memory and imagination how often did she rehearse her angry parting scene with poor Allan and the last time she saw him—the forcible embrace of Hawke Holcroft; the latter's mocking love-making; the horror and loathing with which his touch inspired her; and Allan's terrible glance as he flung away and left her—left her for ever, as it seemed now.
Allan taken captive; he was sure to be slain like those of whom she had read so much lately. He was gone from her, and never more—never again could she show her repentant love for him, or make up for the omissions and follies of the past by days of tenderness in the time to come.
All was over now!