CLARE THORNE'S TEMPTATION.
CHAPTER I.
"After all that has been, and is no more—after all that has passed between us, but never can pass again, why are we fated to meet—and here?" wailed the girl, Clare Thorne, in her heart (for though a wedded wife, she was but a girl yet, being barely in her twentieth year), as she suddenly saw, with strangely-mingled emotions of joy, fear, and sorrow, the face of Fred Wilmot.
It was on a Sunday morning early, ere the East Indian sun was quite up, and in the cantonment church of Mirzapatam, a few miles from the Jumna, that this unexpected recognition took place.
The girl heard not the voice of the preacher, her husband Cecil Thorne, the chaplain of the station; she forgot for a time where she was, and her thoughts fled—fled away from that strange-looking cantonment church, with its long punkahs pulled by nut-brown coolies (who watched with amazement "the white man's poojah") moving alike over the head of the preacher and his congregation, when even at that early hour the air was breathless, and when the ring-necked paraquets, green pigeons, and other birds twittered in and out at the open jalousies—fled home, while her heart seemed to stand still—home to a quaint old English church in beautiful Kent, with its low broad Norman arches, its stained glass windows, its sculptured effigies, above which old iron helmets hung, and spiders spun their dusty webs undisturbed—for there it had been that she had last seen the face she now looked on, breathlessly, the face of her first love and then betrothed, Fred Wilmot, ere misfortune separated them, and a cruel fate sent her to Central India, to become the wife of the Reverend Cecil Thorne.
On the preceding day a new regiment had marched in, but she knew not till that moment at the morning sermon, that among its officers was Lieutenant Frederick Wilmot, till she saw him with his men, in his braided white kalkee uniform, carrying under one arm his pith helmet, encircled by a blue veil, and looking with his lithe form, embrowned face, dark grey eyes and heavy moustache, handsomer than ever, and so unlike her husband, Cecil Thorne, in his flowing white Indian cassock.
Square in figure, grave, massive, and commanding in form, the latter was a man, who, though all kindness and gentleness, seldom smiled and never laughed, and was one all unsuited to the volatile Clare; yet she had married him for a home; though knowing that every thought and impulse of her mind were at variance with his, and had given herself to him because she was heart-sick with the struggle for daily bread as a governess, and feared her hopeless future when left alone in India. A few years before—for he was much her senior—Cecil Thorne had been a hard-working curate on £80 per annum in one of the most squalid parts of the English metropolis, and was thankful to accept from the Bishop of Calcutta the post he held at the remote and sun-baked station of Mirzapatam. He was a good man, truly a soldier of Heaven, and among the sick and the dying, did many a task of mercy, from which even the doctors, and all, save the sisters of charity, shrank, especially in the times of famine and cholera.
Intent on his sermon, he saw not the glance of mutual recognition between Clare and Wilmot, the grave bow exchanged, and the paleness that came over the two young eager faces, whose troubled gaze sought each other from time to time, as their thoughts went back to their past—
"The love that took an early root,
And had an early doom."