A gasping cry escaped her; her poor, torn heart leaped, and then seemed to cease beating, with the dreadful certainty that something—a new calamity—had happened.
CHAPTER X.
ALLAN'S ADVENTURE.
Evil tidings travel fast in these our days of electricity, and true it was that the unfortunate Allan Graham had fallen into the hands of the Bedouins, but nothing more was known.
He had disappeared from Matarieh!
When his detachment marched into headquarters, Sergeant Farquharson reported that the Master of Aberfeldie had left the village for a ramble in the vicinity one evening, so far as could be known, and had not returned. After a careful search by the Highlanders at a certain spot, a cigar-case which had been given to him by Cameron of Stratherroch had been found, and in the immediate vicinity the soil bore the impression of foot and hoof marks, as if a struggle of some kind had taken place. If killed he had not been killed there, as his body could not be found.
Beyond these meagre and unsatisfactory details nothing more was known, save that the Bedouins, intent on plunder and outrage, had been daily hovering about in the vicinity of the mounds and ruins of Heliopolis.
Allan had felt very lonely after the loss of his friend Cameron, all the more lonely and full of tender interest for the general circumstances of his life and fate, and thus—as the sergeant reported—he had rambled from the village where his men were cantoned, a little way into the vicinity to smoke and to ponder over the past and future.
After Cameron's catastrophe he felt himself more disposed to think of Olive, and to think kindly and tenderly, and of his mother's explanatory letter concerning the extraordinary conduct of Holcroft and Olive's love and grief; for we are told that 'among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring; when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring tide,' and in childish affection had the love of Allan Graham and Olive Raymond begun.
He lay stretched on a patch of grass, where two or three banana-trees grew near a ruined wall. The setting sun shed its red light far along the desert that stretched to the land of Goshen, with its luxuriant plains—yea, to the far horizon—and Allan, a thoughtful and a well-read man, as he looked around him, reflected, as he often did, how strange was the land where just then his duty led him—how strange that the Egyptians were there, without a tradition of a parent stock or of another land; that it was only known that a few generations after the Deluge they had become a great nation. In the words of Apollonius Rhodius: